BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Health Communication
This article is part of the Research TopicCombating Social Isolation Among Youth: Strategies for Enhancing Mental and Physical HealthView all 6 articles
Social isolation and initiation skills: A longitudinal test of the Loneliness Model and the buffering effect of cognitive flexibility
Provisionally accepted
Timothy Curran1*
Analisa Arroyo2- 1Utah State University, Logan, United States
- 2University of Georgia, Athens, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The Loneliness Model (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009) posits that social isolation activates cognitive biases wherein people perceive increased social threats and become less sociable. The longitudinal study reported here tested this theoretical tenet in the context of students transitioning to college. Specifically, we examined the association between social isolation and social skills for initiating new relationships, and also examined how cognitive flexibility could potentially buffer the strength of this direct effect. Participants were recruited at a university orientation in the late summer before the start of their first college semester. They reported their levels of social isolation, initiation skills, and cognitive flexibility in August (T1) and again in January (T2). The results showed that T1 social isolation predicted lower initiation skills at T2 while controlling for initiation skills at T1, thus social isolation predicted lower levels of initiation skills at a later time. Cognitive flexibility also buffered this negative relationship, indicating that cognitive flexibility may serve as a protective factor in the link between social isolation and communication skills. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
Keywords: Social Skills, Social Isolation, Cogntive Flexibility, lonelineness, College transition
Received: 17 Aug 2025; Accepted: 11 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Curran and Arroyo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Timothy Curran, tim.curran@usu.edu
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.