Affiliative and communicative personal qualities and loneliness of university students

Abstract

Introduction This article is dedicated to the study of affiliative and communicative personal qualities and experience of loneliness in of university students. The loneliness experience nature is associated with a variety of psychological characteristics of an individual. The affiliative and motivational phenomena that are often repeated over time also become stable psychological personal qualities. The study results are given in the text of this work. Methods Special psychological methods of information collection were used: questionnaire, H.Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, A.Mehrabian Affiliation Tendency Questionnaire (Rogov E.I., 1996, 529 p). Results Results of the study according to A.Mehrabian procedure found associations between the intensity of motives "desire for acceptance" (DA) and "fear of rejection" (FR), on the one hand, and the presence of both objective and subjective loneliness in students - on the other hand. Thus, in combination with data on extraversion and introversion, it can be concluded that the probability of being in a situation of loneliness or consider him/herself lonely exists for introverted types and students with a developed "fear of rejection" in interpersonal relations. Presence of correlation connections between indicators of extraversion and introversion and both affiliative motives is also a corresponding proof. Across the sample, the correlation coefficient r between individual indices DA and FR is 0.474, between extraversion and DA - 0.267, between extraversion and FR - 0.172. Existence of connections is expressed most clearly in the groups of students avoiding loneliness: 0.555, 0.298 and 0.242, respectively (all coefficients are statistically significant at the level of 0.01). DiscussionThese results indicate that the negative and positive experience of loneliness, which is expressed in the presence or absence of desire for its avoidance, as well as subjective definition of him/herself as a lonely or not lonely person, are associated with expression of a number of psychological characteristics of students' personality. Final report Loneliness is a phenomenon that is associated with human relationships and interaction resulting in some experience. The close communication relationship is one of the important criteria to prevent loneliness, but it does not play a decisive role in defining him/herself as a lonely person. The results of empirical study are of practical importance.