Perceived Loneliness and it’s Neuropsychological Correlates: Executive Functioning Difficulties among University Students

This paper examined how perceived loneliness and executive functioning problems relate among the students of a university. The main aim was to confirm the presence of positive links between increased loneliness and worse impairments in executive functioning. The quantitative research design was used, which considered 126 participants (university students), who had taken the UCLA Loneliness Scale and the Barkley Deficits in Executive Functioning Scale Short Form (BDEFS-SF). Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation and independent samples t-test were used to analyse the collected data. The results showed that there was a strong positive relationship between perceived loneliness and executive functioning difficulties (r =.407, p <.001), indicating that students who reported more loneliness also reported more difficulties in executive functioning. Nevertheless, there are no marked gender variations in scores of either loneliness or executive functioning. On the whole, the findings underscore the need to address loneliness in university students because it can lead to consequences in the cognitive functions of such students, their psychological readaptation, and their overall health.