LONELINESS AS RELATED TO VARIOUS PERSONALITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL MEASURES: RESEARCH WITH THE GERMAN ADAPTATION OF THE UCLA LONELINESS SCALE

Two hundred and forty-seven students at a large West German city university were presented with the UCLA Loneliness Scale (a 20-item questionnaire; Russell, Peplau, & Cutona, 1980), with the Freiburg Personality Inventory (FPI; Fahrenberg, Selg, & Hempel, 1978;a personality assessment instrument widely used in German-speaking countries), and with various other questions. Loneliness was found to be correlated with several of the personality subscales of the FPI (psychosomatic complaints, depression, and neuroticism; negative correlations with social skills, self-esteem, extraversion, and masculinity). As in our prior research, a negative correlation was found with self-rated physical attractiveness. Participants giving internal and stable attributions of any loneliness they experienced had higher loneliness scores than did participants giving different attributions. Also, some relationships with social environmental variables were found (e.g., residential mobility was associated with loneliness). A subsample of students being clients at the University Psychological Advisory Service (n = 27) were also investigated. Our results by and large corroborate the findings from prior loneliness research with US samples.