Estimated reading time: 10–12 minutes

What Is Loneliness?

Loneliness is a distressing feeling that arises when the relationships a person experiences fall short of the closeness, connection, or companionship they need or want. It concerns the quality of relationships as well as their number. Someone may feel lonely among other people, while another person may enjoy time alone without feeling lonely.

What Do Character Strengths Have to Do with Loneliness?

Feeling lonely does not necessarily mean having nobody around. A person can attend meetings, exchange messages, and live with family while still missing the kind of closeness that makes them feel understood. Character strengths offer one way to explore the personal qualities involved in connection, alongside the relationships and circumstances that make connection possible. These strengths are positive capacities expressed through thoughts, feelings, and actions, such as curiosity, hope, gratitude, love, and zest. They are not a measure of how deserving someone is of companionship. Nor does loneliness show that a person lacks them.

In her 2023 dissertation, completed as part of her MSc in Applied Positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology at the University of East London, researcher Bana Biri examined how a group of these strengths related to loneliness among immigrants living in Ontario, Canada. The study found that higher scores on the selected strengths, considered together, were associated with lower loneliness. It also found differences between individual strengths and between different aspects of love. This article explains those findings and what they might mean for everyday life. Because the research was observational, it provides evidence about relationships between variables, not proof that practising a strength reduces loneliness.

Why Study Connection After Immigration?

Moving countries can change the ordinary conditions through which relationships develop. Familiar people may become distant, shared routines disappear, and spontaneous contact require more planning. A person may need to navigate a different language, unfamiliar social expectations, or working hours that leave little room for friendship. These are possible experiences rather than a description of every immigrant's life. Migration can also bring welcome relationships, safety, opportunity, and renewed participation. Understanding loneliness requires attention to the particular person and the opportunities available around them.

Research by Islam and Gilmour, published by Statistics Canada in 2023, examined loneliness specifically among older Canadians and found that immigrant subgroups did not all share the same pattern. That study should not be used to describe immigrants of every age. Biri's dissertation considered a different, much smaller Ontario sample, most of whom were in midlife. Its purpose was to ask whether selected personal strengths were related to participants' experiences of loneliness. The question adds a psychological perspective without suggesting that personal qualities can compensate for every social or practical barrier.

The Five Strengths at the Centre of the Study

The dissertation focused on curiosity, gratitude, hope, love, and zest, a group sometimes called the happiness character strengths because of their associations with life satisfaction in the literature discussed in the dissertation. The label does not mean that these are the only valuable strengths or that people must possess them in a particular order to be happy. They also belong to different virtues in the VIA classification. Bringing them together for a research question does not create a seventh VIA virtue. Their relevance here concerns possible connections with well-being and relationships, rather than a prescription for the ideal personality.

Curiosity concerns interest in experience and a willingness to explore. Gratitude involves noticing and appreciating what is valuable or received. Hope concerns a constructive orientation toward the future, while zest involves approaching life with energy and engagement. Love, as a character strength, concerns valuing close relationships in which caring can be mutual. These descriptions help explain the research question, but the study measured questionnaire responses rather than observing daily behaviour. A participant's score cannot tell us precisely how they expressed a strength in a particular relationship.

How the Study Was Conducted

The research used an online survey in July 2023. Forty-four adult immigrants living in Ontario completed the questionnaires, recruited through social circles and social media; recruitment was mainly among Arab immigrants. Most respondents reporting gender were women, and most participants were aged between 35 and 54. The surveys were available in English and Arabic. Participation was voluntary and anonymous, and the University of East London's School of Psychology Ethics Committee approved the study. This was a small exploratory sample, not a representative survey of immigrants across Ontario or Canada.

Participants answered questions about character strengths, loneliness, life satisfaction, and mental well-being. Loneliness was assessed using the six-item De Jong Gierveld scale, and the analysis used its overall score. Life satisfaction concerned people's evaluation of their lives, while mental well-being covered experiences such as positive functioning and positive feelings. These are related but distinct outcomes. All were assessed within the same survey period, so the design could identify associations but could not establish which experiences came first. No strengths-training programme was delivered or tested as part of this research.

What Was Associated with Lower Loneliness?

The combined strengths score had a negative correlation with loneliness of approximately r = −0.50. In ordinary language, participants reporting higher scores on this group of strengths tended to report less loneliness. Among the individual strengths examined, hope had the largest observed negative correlation, also approximately −0.50, followed by zest at −0.42. Gratitude and the individual item about feeling the presence of love in one's life were each approximately −0.38, while curiosity was approximately −0.31. These associations met the study's reported threshold for statistical significance. The figures describe this sample; they are not percentages by which each strength reduced loneliness.

The combined strengths score also remained associated with loneliness in a regression analysis that included gender, age, and years since immigration, using 42 participants. Adjustment for those variables does not rule out other explanations, such as differences in relationship quality or circumstances that the model did not capture. Similarly, the ordering of the correlations does not establish that hope works better than gratitude as an intervention. Demonstrating differences between associations requires more than comparing their numerical sizes. The results identify promising questions for further study rather than a ranking of treatments.

Love Was Not One Undifferentiated Finding

One particularly useful distinction concerned love. The three love items did not show sufficient internal consistency in this sample to be treated as one reliable total score, so they were examined separately. Feeling the presence of love in one's life was significantly associated with lower loneliness. Reporting the ability to express love to someone else, or to accept love from others, did not show statistically significant associations with loneliness. A summary that says every aspect of love was significantly related to less loneliness would therefore misrepresent the detailed results. This distinction matters when translating research into accessible language.

The pattern also differed according to the outcome being considered. Accepting love from others was positively associated with mental well-being, even though its association with loneliness was not statistically significant. That does not make the finding contradictory: mental well-being and loneliness are not interchangeable measures. Nor does a non-significant result prove that a relationship is absent, particularly in a small sample. The finding invites closer examination of how people experience care, express it, and receive it. Those questions may be more useful than treating love as a single instruction to give more to other people.

What the Findings Can and Cannot Explain

Several explanations could fit the observed pattern. Personal strengths might help someone approach opportunities for connection, while supportive relationships might make hope, energy, and appreciation easier to experience. Other circumstances could influence both. The survey cannot distinguish those possibilities, and an association measured at one point cannot show that increasing a strength will produce a later reduction in loneliness. Even the statistical word predictor refers here to a relationship within the model, not a demonstrated ability to forecast an individual's future. The study's practical value lies in opening a question that can be tested more directly.

The same caution applies to life satisfaction and mental well-being. The combined strengths score was positively associated with both, but the individual results were not identical across outcomes. Gratitude, for example, was significantly associated with life satisfaction but not with mental well-being in this sample. Multiple associations were examined, which adds reason to treat isolated findings cautiously. A larger study could assess how stable these patterns are and whether they appear in other groups. Until then, the findings should remain attached to the sample, measures, and design that produced them.

Using the Findings as Questions for Daily Life

The following examples are reflections inspired by the research question, not exercises tested by the dissertation. Someone interested in hope might identify a realistic opportunity for recurring contact and consider more than one way to participate. Someone drawing on curiosity might ask a genuine follow-up question rather than assume that an unfamiliar person's experience is already understood. Gratitude could take the form of acknowledging a specific act of care, while zest might be expressed through a manageable shared activity. Each example turns an abstract quality into an observable action. Whether it is helpful depends on the person, the relationship, and the situation.

The distinction around love suggests another question: where do I actually experience care, and what kind of connection is missing? A person who gives generously may still need opportunities to be understood or supported. Practising a strength should not become an obligation to disclose private information, tolerate mistreatment, or keep pursuing an unreceptive relationship. It may be more useful to seek a setting with regular, welcome participation than to demand greater enthusiasm from oneself. A small attempt can provide information about fit without proving anything about one's character. None of these suggestions replaces the need for relationships in which other people also respond.

It is also helpful to distinguish chosen solitude from unwanted disconnection. Quiet time may be welcome, while a crowded social calendar may still leave an important relational need unmet. For the reader, this means asking what kind of contact is missing before deciding that more activity is the answer. Is the difficulty finding people with shared interests, having someone trustworthy to confide in, or feeling included in ordinary community life? These possibilities can overlap, but they call attention to different needs. The questionnaire results cannot provide that individual understanding on their own.

What a Stronger Follow-Up Study Would Need

The sample size and participation pattern limit the conclusions. Although 106 people began the survey, only 44 completed it; the experiences of those who did not finish may have differed. Recruitment through personal networks and social media also limits generalisation. All measures relied on self-report, and some strength scales had low internal consistency. The gratitude score was calculated after removing one item, while the love items were analysed separately; the overall loneliness scale also had modest reliability in this sample. These details affect how confidently the findings can be interpreted and replicated.

A further distinction concerns the meaning of statistical significance. It describes how the data relate to a statistical hypothesis under the analysis used; it does not certify that a finding is large, practically important, or certain to recur. In this study, the correlations are useful descriptive signals, but their precision is limited by the small sample. Readers should therefore avoid using them to decide which strength another person needs. A conversation about the person's circumstances can reveal needs that a group average cannot capture. Research can inform that conversation without replacing it.

A useful next study could recruit a larger and more diverse sample, combine questionnaires with interviews, and follow participants over time. Interviews could clarify what connection and belonging mean in different circumstances, rather than assuming that identical scores describe identical experiences. To test whether a strengths-based programme reduces loneliness, researchers would need an intervention study with an appropriate comparison group and follow-up measures. Such work should also examine access to social opportunities and support. Biri's dissertation offers an exploratory starting point: personal strengths deserve attention within the wider conditions of belonging, while loneliness deserves understanding rather than blame.

References

• Biri, B. (2023). Happiness character strengths (character strengths subset) and their relation to loneliness among immigrants in Ontario, Canada [Master’s dissertation, University of East London].
• Islam, M. K., & Gilmour, H. (2023). Immigrant status and loneliness among older Canadians. Health Reports, 34(7), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.25318/82-003-x202300700001-eng

Original symbol credit: VIA Institute on Character.