The echoes of childhood: How parental bonding and emotional trauma shape loneliness in young adults

Background: Loneliness is a subjective and painful experience resulting from an imbalance between desired and perceived social relationships. Several situational factors may increase loneliness in young adults. The study aimed to explore the association between parental bonding and loneliness by including childhood traumatic experiences and current psychological distress as potential mediators. Method: A sample of 608 college students in psychology (Mage = 21.23, SD = 2.10) was consecutively enrolled. Sociodemographic characteristics, parental bonding (PBI), loneliness (UCLA), childhood traumatic emotional experiences (CTQ), anxiety (GAD-7), depressive (PHQ-9), and somatic symptoms (PHQ-15) were assessed through an online survey. After preliminarily assessing frequency distributions, descriptive statistics, and correlation, we performed a path analysis to examine both direct and indirect effects among the variables of interest. Results: The path model showed that PBI care was negatively associated with traumatic experiences in childhood (ps ≤ 0.01). Both emotional abuse and neglect during childhood predicted higher levels of anxiety and depression (ps ≤ 0.05). Emotional abuse further predicted somatic symptoms (p <.001). Finally, loneliness was positively predicted by childhood traumatic emotional experiences, both neglect and abuse (ps < 0.001), as well as by depression (p <.001). Overall, the model explained a significant amount of variance in the UCLA scale (R2 = 0.44, p <.001). Conclusions: Childhood trauma and adult depressive symptoms mediate the link between low parental care and loneliness. Recognizing early negative parental bonding's impact allows for tailored interventions to enhance psychological well-being by addressing early attachment issues.