Children in the modern age have fewer friends than seen in the past, but they are also less likely to be lonely, a new study reveals.

Research released in 2006 showed people in the modern age are less likely than before to join clubs, have fewer close friends, and are less likely to trust others. New studies show humans are now more extroverted than people in the past, and have higher self-esteem than those people who lived years ago.

British and Australian researchers from the University of Queensland and Griffith University conducted a study of students from high school and college, seeking to better understand how social behaviors of youth have changed over time.

Researchers created a meta-analysis of studies examining loneliness in college students between 1978 and 2009. They found young people are slowly becoming less lonely over time. Females were shown to be slightly less lonely than males, although each gender showed improvement over the three decades examined.

A second examination by investigators expanded the analysis to a greater number of subjects, including teens in high school. Much of the data on secondary school students was collected through the Monitoring the Future (MTF) project, which collects information on behavior of high school students. This project attempts to assess feelings of isolation by measuring feelings of loneliness, and the desire for additional friends, each labeled as examples of subjective isolation. Qualities of friendships, such as the ability to converse well with others and building emotional support, were considered in the extended study.

"[T]he trend in loneliness may be caused by modernization. People become less dependent on their families and need more specialized skills, which could lead to less interest in social support and more self-sufficiency. Over time, people are more individualistic, more extroverted, and have higher self-esteem," David Clark, lead researcher on the study, said.

Young people who reported having fewer friends were also less likely to state they wanted to make more friends. This emphasis on quality over quantity was interpreted as a sign of higher self-esteem.

One of the great questions of the study is the degree to which culture factored into the findings. Subjects examined in the research were all from the United States, and future research will examine if loneliness is also declining in youth of other nations. If so, then modern technology is likely the cause of the effect, as smartphones and tablets become more common worldwide. If loneliness is declining among American youth, but not those in other parts of the world, then another national factor could be responsible for the change.

Investigation of social loneliness in young people was detailed in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.