A better human condition
Enrico DiTommaso studies psychology because he wants to know how to make people happier.
The chair of the University of New Brunswick’s Saint John psychology department has developed a scale to assess loneliness that’s been used across the world. It’s not because he’s fascinated with being alone, though — it’s because he wants to understand why people feel that way in order to help them.
“What makes people happier, healthier, and good to themselves and others?” asks DiTommaso. “That’s always my end goal.”
The Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale — which was first designed as part of DiTommaso’s graduate studies in the mid 1980s at UNB Fredericton — has been published in English, French and Turkish, and has been used as part of studies in Canada, Spain, Turkey, Denmark, the Netherlands, Iran and the U.S.
He loves the fact that he’s been able to spread the wealth.
“One of the reasons we developed it was to make it available for free to people who are doing research to understand the human condition,” he says. “To me, that’s more important as a human being than publishing — that people are using it.”
Redefining a concept
Loneliness wasn’t a well-studied aspect of psychology until the 1980s. DiTommaso fell into the field in the earlier part of that decade when his MA and PhD supervisor, Professor Barry Spinner of UNB Fredericton, suggested he read Peplau and Perlman’s Loneliness: A Sourcebook of Current Theory, Research and Therapy, one of the first major books on the study of loneliness.
The book had a big impact on the professor, who left friends and family in Montreal to study at UNB. He soon realized that “Maybe loneliness wasn’t just this one big block, maybe it had multiple dimensions.”
Studying at UNB let him work directly with Spinner on some of the pioneering work on specific types of loneliness. At the time, several theorists had proposed that loneliness could be more effectively looked at in terms of two different chunks: social loneliness and emotional loneliness. However, no measure existed to assess these two proposed components. So, DiTommaso and Spinner set out to develop one.
The initial version of the loneliness assessment scale had 76 questions, which was then whittled down to 37, and eventually to 15 questions. When doing analyses on the scale, the professor explains, he realized that loneliness appeared to be more complex than he had realized.
“We were creating questions based on two dimensions — emotional loneliness, or lack of satisfaction with your intimate relationships; and social, lack of satisfaction with your network of friends. Well guess what? We kept running our analyses and we kept getting three.
“What happened was that the emotional component broke up into family and romantic relationships, and the level of satisfaction in those two areas, while the social component remained by itself.”
To each their own
Loneliness, DiTommaso explains, is different for every person. The scale he developed allows a person to assess how lonely they are, along with what type they may be experiencing at a given moment, but not necessarily why.
“I can’t tell you if you’re lonely or not. You could have 100 friends and be quite socially lonely — because it’s not number of friends, it’s really the quality of those friendships and your perception of them.”
Everyone feels lonely sometimes, he continues, but it’s when it becomes uncontrollable and chronic that problems arise.
“Being lonely is associated with all kinds of health problems, from physical to psychological. Just like stress, it’s not a good condition. There’s nothing wrong with being transiently lonely for a month or two because you just moved to a new place, like if you don’t know anyone in your first year of university. That’s OK; most of us will adjust.”
“But some of us, for some reason, don’t adjust — and it becomes chronic. And when that happens, it can trigger a number of different problems and make it a very aversive experience for people.”
It all comes down to healthy relationships.
“My work has set out to find how our relationships — something we all strive to have — can lead us to a better quality of life and well-being.”
Contributed by Josh O'Kane. This story was made possible thanks to the financial support of the UNB Associated Alumni.
