Interrelationships Between Social and Emotional Loneliness and Multiple Domains of Cognition in Later Life: A Longitudinal Approach

While the literature suggests that loneliness may undermine cognitive functioning in later life, no work has simultaneously examined the associations between these constructs, taking a multidimensional approach to the assessment of each, where 360 older adults comprised the initial sample and 220 such persons comprised the 1-year longitudinal sample. Based upon correlational and regression-based data analyses, we found that social loneliness at Time 1 predicted everyday cognitive failures at Time 2, and that Time 1 poorer health, less education, less positive lifestyle attitudes, greater cognitive failures, and lower fluid ability performance were associated with greater Time 2 social loneliness. Neither social nor emotional loneliness predicted crystallized or fluid ability over time. These findings suggest that loneliness-cognition associations may be temporal in nature and support a view of loneliness-cognition associations in later life that is multidimensional in nature.