Six papers this time, and the one to start with is Zhao, Dewitte, McKenna-Plumley and colleagues, who finally do what the field has been quietly avoiding: they put existential isolation and existential loneliness into one model, in a representative UK adult sample, and check whether they are the same thing. They are not. Existential loneliness partially mediates the path from isolation to depressive symptoms, which is roughly what one would expect if the first is a cognition and the second is its emotional bill. The exploratory finding is better than the confirmatory one: need for uniqueness has a U-shaped relationship with depression. Wanting to be like everyone else hurts; wanting to be unlike anyone else hurts too. Somewhere in the middle sits the person who is fine, and I am not sure anyone has met them.
Mi and Li take the same construct to Chinese college students and push it further downstream, to suicidal ideation, with entrapment as the mediator and authenticity as the moderator. The moderation is the interesting part: authenticity weakens every single path in the model. The design is the familiar cross-sectional self-report with bootstrapped indirect effects, so treat the arrows as correlations wearing a costume. Terepyshchyi looks at isolation through a very different lens — the phenomenology of digital loneliness in wartime Ukraine, where social media is not a distraction but the main channel of contact left. No data, but a sharp line between algorithmic hyperpresence and actually being alone, and a useful reminder that the concept was not invented for undergraduates.
Then the questionnaires, because this is an existential digest and someone must validate something. García-Alandete tests the Existential Concerns Questionnaire in Spanish adults over 65 and settles on a second-order model — General Existential Anxiety, Death Anxiety, Avoidance — invariant across gender and age. If you use the ECQ, this is now the reference for older samples; the Avoidance subscale still wobbles, and the author says so himself. Hassan and colleagues validate the MLQ for Indonesian students aged 13 to 24: two factors, invariance across sex and education, no surprises. After Chinese adolescents and Spanish BPD patients in the April digest, the MLQ now travels better than most of us. Myers and Singh contribute a reference-work entry on the Existential Quest Scale, without an abstract. It exists. For the scale itself, the Rasch validation by Rizzo and colleagues from the April digest is where the information is.
Read the notes, that's where the opinions are.