Loneliness is an unpleasant
feelingEmotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
in which a
personA person is a human being, or an entity that has certain capacities or attributes strongly associated with being human , for example in a particular moral or legal context...
feels a strong sense of
emptinessEmptiness as a human condition is a sense of generalized boredom, social alienation and apathy. Feelings of emptiness often accompany dysthymia, depression, loneliness, despair, or other mental/emotional disorders such as borderline personality disorder...
and
solitudeSolitude is a state of seclusion or isolation, i.e., lack of contact with people. It may stem from bad relationships, deliberate choice, infectious disease, mental disorders, neurological disorders or circumstances of employment or situation .Short-term solitude is often valued as a time when one...
resulting from inadequate levels of social relationships. However, it is a
subjectiveSubjective may refer to:* Subjectivity, a subject's personal perspective, feelings, beliefs, desires or discovery, as opposed to those made from an independent, objective, point of view** Subjective experience, the subjective quality of conscious experience...
experience. Loneliness has also been described as social pain - a psychological mechanism meant to alert an individual of isolation and motivate her/him to seek social connections.
People can experience loneliness for many reasons and many life events are associated with it, like the lack of
friendshipFriendship is a form of interpersonal relationship generally considered to be closer than association, although there is a range of degrees of intimacy in both friendships and associations. Friendship and association are often thought of as spanning across the same continuum...
relations during
childhoodChildhood is the age span ranging from birth to adolescence. In developmental psychology, childhood is divided up into the developmental stages of toddlerhood , early childhood , middle childhood , and adolescence .- Age ranges of childhood :The term childhood is non-specific and can imply a...
and
adolescenceAdolescence is a transitional stage of physical and mental human development generally occurring between puberty and legal adulthood , but largely characterized as beginning and ending with the teenage stage...
, or the physical absence of meaningful people around a person are a few causes for loneliness.