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A Framingham social-network study found loneliness clustered up to three degrees of separation and at the network’s edges, but a 2025 model shows why that pattern alone cannot prove emotional contagion
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Using decades of data from the Framingham Heart Study, they found that loneliness was not scattered randomly through a community.
It clustered among connected people, reached as far as a friend’s friend’s friend, and appeared disproportionately around the network’s edges.
A person’s loneliness was associated most strongly with that of direct contacts, but the relationship remained above chance at two and three degrees of separation.
They controlled for a person’s earlier loneliness and examined whether one contact’s loneliness predicted another person’s later response.
A 2025 model recreated the pattern through different routesA 2025 study in Scientific Reports returned directly to the loneliness question with an agent-based computational model.