Loneliness refers to a subjectively unpleasant experience that results from a perceived deficiency in one 's social relationships ( Peplau and Perlman , 1982 ) . Concerns about increased loneliness have been expressed and reported in studies utilizing cross - sectional data sets during the COVID-19 pandemic ( Beutel et al . , 2021;Bu et al . , 2020b;Cohn - Schwartz et al . , 2021;Groarke et al . , 2020 ) , and , for example , a longitudinal study on the Dutch general population reported increased prevalence of emotional loneliness after the outbreak of the virus ( van der Velden et al . , 2021 ) . However , some previous longitudinal investigations have reported no significant population - wide changes after the outbreak of the pandemic but have found some evidence of increased loneliness in subgroups such as single individuals living alone , older people , and extroverted youth while social distancing were in effect ( Alt et al . , 2021;Hansen et al . , 2021;Luchetti et al . , 2020;van Tilburg et al . , 2021 ) .