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The relationships between social support and loneliness: A meta-analysis and review
Open accessAbstract
The loneliness of modern people is becoming more and more prominent, and has brought profoundly negative effects on mental health. Social support is an important predictor of loneliness. However, the size of the correlation reported by studies on the relation between social support and loneliness varies greatly. The aim of this meta-analysis is to determine the relation between social support and loneliness. One hundred and seventy-seven articles (N = 113,427) were identified, and robust variance estimation with random effects were used. As expected, higher levels of social support were negatively correlated with loneliness (r = -0.39). The association between social support and loneliness were also moderated by several variables. Specifically, the negative relationship between loneliness and social support among rural populations is stronger than that of urban populations in Chinese samples, the effect of perceived social support (r = -0.45) on loneliness is greater than that of other social supports (r = -0.36), and the friend support (r = -0.48) played a more important role in reducing loneliness than that of two other supports (family support: r = -0.34; significant other support: r = -0.40). The current results support robust links between social support and loneliness, emphasizing the important role of social support in reducing levels of loneliness, this may have some implications for future research and loneliness treatments.
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“Loneliness and social support have an inverse relationship: people who feel socially supported are less subject to loneliness (Matthews et al., 2016; Teo et al., 2013; Zhang and Dong, 2022).”
From Social connections combat loneliness and promote wellbeing among college students coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic (2025) · cites this paper as Zhang and Dong, 2022
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Background
Metadata
- Authors
- Zhang, X., & Dong, S.
- Affiliations
- Jiangxi Normal University (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Zhang, Xing
- Venue
- Acta Psychologica
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2022-07
- Volume
- 227
- Pages
- 103616
- ISSN
- 0001-6918 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4280498737
- Cited by
- 222
- References
- 47
- Citations by year
- 2026: 75 · 2025: 82 · 2024: 44 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 2
- FWCI
- 5.09
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Acta Psychologica (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- Jiangxi Normal University Yaohu Campus (JD20061)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Health › Health disparities and outcomes
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Attachment and Relationship Dynamics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Health and Well-being Studies
- Keywords
- social support, loneliness, perceived social support, friend support, family support, significant other support, urban-rural differences, Chinese adults, mental health
- MeSH terms
- Humans, Loneliness, Social Support, Asian People
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