When: 04/05/2026, 14:00-15:00
Where: Pleinlaan 5, Raadzaal, room 4.21 on the fourth floor (in-person only)
Free entry, no registration required.
About the seminar's topic:
Many children and adolescents feel (or have felt) lonely. This is not necessarily problematic (we would be worse off if we would not be able to feel lonely!) and, indeed, for many youth (and adults alike) loneliness is a temporary experience without long-lasting negative consequences. At the same time, however, for a considerable proportion of youth, loneliness is not temporary and does detrimentally affect their current and future mental and physical well-being as well as their social, academic, and occupational functioning. It is, therefore, crucial to identify when and for whom loneliness (mostly) serves its adaptive function and when and for whom loneliness becomes harmful. In this seminar, I will discuss how we can conceptualize and operationalize (different types of) loneliness and which factors play a role in its development and maintenance, whereby taking a socio-ecological perspective as individuals do not live in isolation, but together with other people - and they do so in a particular context.
About the speaker:
Marlies Maes is an assistant professor at Youth Studies, Interdisciplinary Social Science, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is interested in social relationships among humans and in the painful feeling of loneliness, which may arise when something is missing in those relationships. Furthermore, she loves to travel and meet people from all over the world, intrigued by the similarities and differences between (but also within) cultures. In addition, she has a strong interest in methodological and statistical issues, including psychometrics and different meta-analytic techniques. More
