User:Af975949

Bibliography

This article, Affinity for Solitude and Motivations for Spending Time Alone Among Early and Mid-Adolescents, is a peer reviewed article that is helpful for my topic on the importance of spending time alone. I chose this one because it mentions positive and negative effects of solitude, which will give me lots of information to edit on the solitude talk page, which talks a lot about positive/negative solitude effects. The authors provide easy access to citations, and easy headers on the articles so I can find the information I need quickly. They also included all of their citations at the bottom.

In the article Social Withdrawal and Aloneliness in Adolescence: Examining the Implications of Too Much and Not Enough Solitude, I found more crucial information on the positive/negative effects of solitude, and this article adds more information on adolescents. This article gave information on the developing young mind and why it is important for specifically younger people to have solitude. Same with the last authors, they included sources at the end that could be helpful for my own research.

This article, The Impact of Spending Time Alone on Emerging Adults’ Mental Well-Being, by Lisa Dixon, is another peer reviewed article that backs up the importance of solitude on young adults entering the real world. This article mainly focuses on the benefits  that being alone can bring to your anxiety and depression. I liked this article a lot because Dixon also chose to incorporate social media into the article, and how taking breaks from social media is beneficial towards young minds.

In this video, by Dr. Robert Puff, he quickly but thoroughly explains his outlook on benefits of solitude in his podcast called Happiness Podcast. Puff talks about how the key factor in getting to know someone is spending time with them, and how this fact is also true for ourselves. Robert Puff has a PhD., is an author of 13 books, TV show host, children's psychologist, etc. I like the style and calmness of his videos, and his credentials make the videos seem more trustworthy. He has a majority of other videos on his Youtube channel that are in similar categories to this one.

This book, called The Handbook of Solitude, edited by Robert J. Coplan and Julie C. Bowker, is an informative and interesting book because they took many stances on whether or not spending lots of time alone is beneficial. I liked that they took multiple standpoints and eliminated any speculation a reader could have about the authors having a biased point of view. They provided a lengthy table of contents and source page and they have lots of background on the concept of solitude itself. They also offered real world examples and stories, making their information easy to visualize and understand.

After reading a little of the introduction and abstract, Solitude: A Return to the Self, by Anthony Storr, is an older book on the impact solitude has on coming into yourself and finding your individuality. This book has a lot of information on individuality and learning how to be alone with yourself, but also adds the significance of human relationships, similar to the other book sources. The table of contents makes this book easy to navigate, I just wish the author included a citation for the book itself. A plus is that he includes lots of quotes and sources within the chapters.

A History of Solitude, by David Vincent, offers lots of historical information on the idea of solitude. He covers why articles and books on solitude back in 1791 were rejected and looked down upon, and what happened when people finally printed articles and other texts on solitude. People thought the idea was depressing and those who would read something like this had something wrong with them. I like the style and the clarity of his book, the author makes it easy to understand.

In the text Individual Differences in Preference for Solitude, by Jerry Burger, he covers many different opinions on solitude preferences. I thought this text was interesting because he doesn’t have a personal standpoint, he just adds information on how people handled solitude in the past and how they handle it now. He gives some background on humans and how we all feel about interaction and forming relationships, which I think will be a good addition to the talk page I found because I don’t see much on there about human relationships and how we think.

This text, Solitude and the Activity of Thinking, by Roger Berkowitz, explains the importance of thinking in regards to solitude. I chose to include this 15-page text because it gave a different viewpoint than the ones I previously found. This text mainly focuses on how solitude benefits thoughts and how solitude is “necessary” for the activity of thinking. This text will give me good information to use on my point of “making yourself smarter” just by being alone more often and listening to yourself. Berkowitz did a good job of giving background information and using world renowned names, like Socrates and Emerson, to back up his claims and give them more credibility.

Virginia Thomas conducted a study using mostly men to seek data on what positive solitude can do to one's emotions, actions, and thoughts. I chose this because all of the results showed that the participants enjoyed activities more, were able to regulate their emotions, and they used their alone time mindfully to connect with themselves. Thomas states that by practicing positive solitude, and knowing when to exit it, is something that “sustains the private self” and should be practiced and implemented everywhere. Virginia Thomas is a qualitative psychologist hoping to explore solitude skill training in the future.