Phoebe McKenna-Plumley on existential loneliness
Phoebe McKenna-Plumley is a Research Fellow at the School of Psychology in Queen’s University Belfast. She earned her B.A. in Psychology at the University of Galway and her Ph.D. at Queen’s University Belfast under the mentorship of Drs. Jenny Groarke, Rhiannon Turner, and Keming Yang. Phoebe co-runs an Early Career Loneliness Research Network and is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research utilizes a multi-method approach, employing quantitative, qualitative, and evidence synthesis methodologies to study social well-being and dimensions and experiences of loneliness across the lifespan.
Phoebe on the web: GoogleScholar | Research Gate
By Peter Helm, Montana State University. August 02, 2024.
Counter-clockwise from top left: Jean Paul Sartre, Sartre’s (1944) No Exit, and a scene from the play.
ISSEP: How did you first become aware of and interested in existentialism and the science of existential psychology more broadly?
Phoebe McKenna-Plumley: Initially, I was very into French. When I was a teenager, I studied French all through my school years and a little bit into Uni as well. I was reading Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and everything French I could get my hands on. At the time, I don’t think I was aware it was existentialist literature. While I wasn’t going into this particularly interested in the existential themes per se, it rang very true—especially Sartre’s (1944) No Exit, which explores the idea of needing to be validated in the eyes of other people, and how painful it is when you know that other people don't see you the way that you want to be seen. I’d had some angsty adolescent experiences, like so many people do, where I felt different and alone as though nobody understood me. At Uni, with my undergrad in Psychology, I did get a bit of exposure to terror management theory but it was really during my Ph.D., through getting interested in different dimensions of loneliness and getting curious about existential loneliness, that I became more directly interested in existentialism and existential psychology. I’m encouraged to see a growing interest in research on existential loneliness.
ISSEP: You’ve been doing some fascinating research in existential psychology lately. Could you tell us more about your work with existential loneliness?
Phoebe McKenna-Plumley: I'm looking at the multi-dimensional aspects of loneliness across the lifespan and different life stages. Specifically, I’m interested in social, emotional, and existential loneliness with a focus on existential loneliness, because there is so little research on it.
We recently published a systematic review of the qualitative literature on how people describe experiences of existential loneliness (McKenna-Plumley et al., 2023). This was with no restrictions on demographics like age or nation and only included non-clinical literature. One thing we found that I thought was so interesting was that, for some people, loneliness seems to be experienced as a general, pervasive, and all-encompassing experience. And for others, it seems to relate to specific other people or specific types of relationships or specific kinds of characteristics of people. So, some people just seem to feel generally lonely, whereas other people feel lonely because they miss their parents who live far away, or because they don't have like-minded people around them, or people who share some kind of characteristics like age or ethnicity. We're now trying to expand that work by looking at whether the general pervasive sense of disconnection is what predicts existential loneliness. So, it’s been a lot of evidence synthesis leading to qualitative and quantitative primary data collection.
ISSEP: How did you get into using qualitative and mixed-method techniques to study existential loneliness?
Phoebe McKenna-Plumley: Like many people, my early work in my undergrad as a research assistant was focused on quantitative research. When I moved on to my master's, half my lectures were in psychology and half in sociology, and most of the students in the program were doing qualitative work. I was already curious about that type of work and really enjoyed reading qualitative research, and the program gave me such a drive to explore those methods in more depth. I came to appreciate the insights one could achieve with qualitative research, even though it's looser and more “interpretive” than quantitative research in a lot of ways. Together, the combination of qualitative and quantitative research can really give a more holistic picture of people’s experiences.
Qualitative research can try to gather participants’ own perceptions of their experiences and behaviors. To the extent that participants actually have conscious access to the relevant phenomena, and are willing and able to share relevant insights, those qualitative methods can produce some incredibly rich phenomenological descriptions. Surveys can try to quantitatively measure some of those thoughts, feelings, or behaviors in systematic ways. And other quantitative methods, such as experiments and implicit measures, can observe the multitude of important factors in participants’ psychological experiences that occur outside their conscious experiences.
I was involved in some research on proprioceptive development, which can’t possibly be studied using qualitative interviews, which was important work. But I’ve also done qualitative interviews about people’s feelings of existential loneliness—which people can and do consciously experience—and it’s been remarkable to see the amount that we were able to learn just by asking!
For example, qualitative research on loneliness helped the field to learn that loneliness is not simply about a lack of social interaction. After many years, a ton of quantitative surveys had found, for example, that many people who go to church every weekend were still feeling lonely. And then researchers finally just asked them, in qualitative interviews, about why they were feeling that way and learned that it had to do with a lack of emotional and existential connection as well. I wonder how much more quickly the field have advanced if researchers had included those sorts of qualitative interview studies from the outset? Those sorts of considerations make be a big believer in using a mixed method approach – it’s great because you can really gain a more holistic understanding of nearly any important phenomena, such as existential loneliness!
ISSEP: In what ways can you research help us make sense of important human experiences, better understand important events, or inform our cultural or technological trends?
Phoebe McKenna-Plumley: Totally. Think about social media, in general, and then think about it in the context of the pandemic. In general, the promise of social media was that it would help build and strengthen connections. So, presumably, with all the tweets and zooms available at the push of a button, nobody would ever feel lonely! But that’s not exactly how it turned out. To that point, the pandemic was an important period of time where a lot of people were looking for connection, and were in a position where they were having technological connection with other people through social media posts and digital news, but were realizing that it wasn’t sufficient. Social media meant people were not socially isolated—they had objective connections—but those connections weren’t meaningful, and people were still feeling emotionally and existentially lonely.
In some of my research, people said that they felt like digital connection wasn't real, wasn’t enough. The most important feature of social interaction isn’t the number of interactions or available people you could speak to; it’s the meaningfulness of the connections with other people. This highlights the nuance behind loneliness experiences and really underscores that understanding what contributes to meaningful connection is so important.
ISSEP: Do you see your research topic when you look at the arts and humanities?
Phoebe McKenna-Plumley: I see it everywhere—in books, and films, and music, all over. Existential loneliness seems to be a driver of so much art and culture. I'm currently reading the Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell. It's not what I normally read, but it’s so good. It's about a duchess in Renaissance Italy. She has been married to this much older man, so she's essentially a child in comparison. The writing has this very tight narrative, all about her internal thoughts and feelings, which are almost never communicated to the people around her. She was never really connected to her family and now she’s with someone very different than her. The reader gets the sense that she's never really alone, but she's also constantly disconnected from everyone around her in this really meaningful way. It’s such a rich illustration of existential loneliness.
ISSEP: You’ve attended and presented research at our Existential Psychology Pre-conferences; how has your experience been with those?
Phoebe McKenna-Plumley: I’ve really loved it! I was just talking to someone recently about the various pre-conferences, and I was saying how I had such a good experience at the existential psych pre-conference. It was such a nice opportunity to meet other researchers in this area, like yourself (Peter Helm) and Elizabeth Pinel and others who gave friendly feedback on my work. I think getting to meet other people who are doing this kind of work was the best bit.
It was also just a really welcoming environment, which was nice because my research was just beginning to explore existential psychology topics. So, I was a bit nervous about how my work would be received, but everyone was super welcoming and supportive.
The presentations were also great. I really liked the series of five-minute “data blitz” mini-talks, I thought those were fantastic. There was also a great talk by Tamar Kushnir, about her research on developmental understanding of free will and responsibility, which was just so fascinating.
“Reaching out and talking to people is my main advice... Another useful bit of advice is to be willing, at least initially, to go with the flow and get involved in ongoing research projects.”
ISSEP: What is one piece of advice you would give to future students who have an interest in following in your footsteps?
Phoebe McKenna-Plumley: Reaching out and talking to people is my main advice. So much of what I've learned and so many opportunities I've had have just been from being able to get involved with kind people who themselves are curious and interested, and were willing to facilitate my being curious and interested too, especially when I didn't know a lot about the specifics. It can be really scary to reach out, especially to people who are very senior. But in my experience, most people are friendly and are totally willing to give you their time.
Another useful bit of advice is to be willing, at least initially, to go with the flow and get involved with ongoing research projects. For example, people have brought me on to research projects where I really learned how to do behind-the-scenes work—all of the aspects of research that you can't learn in the classroom, like how publication works. Of course, not everyone you contact is going to be able to bring you on to their research projects. But even just having a chat can be very beneficial. So, I would advise people to reach out, express that you're interested in their work or ask a question, and see where that takes you.
ISSEP: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself outside of the work/research context?
Phoebe McKenna-Plumley: I do a lot of yoga and have been trying to do more collaging, and reading, and getting out into nature.
I also enjoy traveling and I travel a lot, which I feel quite lucky about. I really enjoy traveling to visit friends and family, and also to explore new places. However, I do have a bit of tension there, as I also love going back to the places I’ve been before. I think I'm biased there because I lived in Italy for a while, and I just think you can't beat Italy. There's just so many beautiful places to go and it has almost absolutely everything that a place could have. It’s hard to have a favorite place in Italy, but some highlights are Rome (I know it's a cliché, but it's so great). I also lived in a place incredibly beautiful and close to Venice, that was completely out of this world. And Puglia, which is in the south, I think is underrated relative to the rest of Italy. It's just incredible—beautiful people, beautiful food, gorgeous coastline. Very special.
ISSEP: A lot of us like to listen to music while working, what’re you listening to lately?
Phoebe McKenna-Plumley: When I work, I usually can't listen to music. I wish I could but I find it distracting. If I listen to music while working, it’s usually more generic Lo Fi beats just to have something in my ears.
When I’m not working, I’m way more into music. I've been listening to CMAT a lot; she's an Irish artist who's coming up. I saw her live and she was incredible: so much energy doing very cool, almost Americana, sort of acoustic music. She has some interesting songs, like “I want to be a cowboy, baby!” and “Lonely” which is perhaps a bit apropos. Lankum and Villagers are two other Irish bands I listen to a lot. One track I've been listening to that loads recently is The First Day by Villagers. Outside of the Irish music, Fleet Foxes is always on rotation, as well as Loyle Carner, Khamari, and Taylor Swift (of course).