AGE DIFFERENCES IN AFFECTIVE AND BIOLOGICAL CORRELATES OF MOMENTARY SOLITUDE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spending time alone constitutes a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives. As we get older, alone time increases. However, not much is known about age differences in the experience of spending time alone (momentary solitude). We examined relationships between momentary solitude, affect quality, and two hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity markers (salivary cortisol; dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate [DHEAs]) to better understand the affective and biological correlates of momentary solitude across the adult lifespan. For this purpose, 185 adults aged 20 to 81 years (M age = 49 years, 51% female, 74% Caucasian) completed questionnaires on momentary solitude (alone vs. not alone) and current affect on a handheld device and provided concurrent saliva samples up to seven times a day for 10 consecutive days. Multilevel model results showed that, compared to being with others, momentary solitude was concurrently associated with reduced high arousal positive affect, increased low arousal positive affect, and increased low arousal negative affect. Age by solitude interactions indicate that greater age was associated with increased high arousal positive affect and reduced low arousal negative affect during momentary solitude. Furthermore, momentary solitude was associated with increased cortisol and DHEAs. With greater age, the association between momentary solitude and cortisol weakened and was not significant in adults aged 52 years and older. Findings suggest that momentary solitude can be a double-edged sword as evidenced by both positive and negative well-being implications. Importantly, greater age is linked to more favorable affective and biological correlates of momentary solitude.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".