Research

Postdoctoral Research In Focus  

Dr Arran Davis: exploring the relationship between poverty, loneliness, and a defensive symptom cluster

https://www.youtube.com/embed/KQfVa7onzdY?si=LOH2DaEUsxx1xfqw

Evolutionary anthropologist Dr Arran Davis is interested in how social relationships affect human behaviour, health, and well-being. Here he describes recent work using the European Social Survey (around 25,000 responses from 20 countries) to examine how a defensive symptom cluster, characterized by pain, fatigue, and low mood, varies according to individuals’ social connections and socioeconomic status.

He found that this symptom cluster was more prevalent in lonely individuals, with particularly strong associations for individuals who were both lonely and experiencing poverty. He also found that people living on low incomes were especially at risk for feeling lonely. These findings highlight the important connections between human sociality, economic inequality, and health and will form the basis for future research projects.