Loneliness and Wisdom Are Negatively Associated in Neurologically Healthy Older Adults

Wisdom is a constellation of socio-emotional skills and of recent interest as a potential tool in mitigating loneliness and its negative effects. We examined the relationship between loneliness and wisdom in 159 neurologically healthy community-dwelling older adults from the Hillblom Aging Network (pre-registered at https://osf.io/2jmfz), hypothesizing that wisdom is inversely associated with loneliness. Given a potential association between loneliness and neurodegeneration, we verified our cohort as neurologically normal via neurological and neuropsychological evaluation to avoid introducing a spurious relationship between loneliness and wisdom. We additionally tested if normal variation in cognition affects the relationship between loneliness and wisdom. We compared three nested regression models to assess model effects of covarying for executive function, predicting loneliness from wisdom. We also explored correlations between each of the six subscale domains of wisdom (decisiveness, emotional regulation, insight, prosocial behaviors, social advising, and tolerance for divergent values) and loneliness. Loneliness was inversely associated with wisdom in a model including executive function as a covariate (also inversely associated with loneliness). Wisdom subcomponents decisiveness, emotional regulation, social advising, and prosocial behaviors were inversely correlated with loneliness. While causality cannot be determined in this study, our results suggest that wisdom may be a protective factor in mitigating loneliness.