that intervention are effective. Though they also found no reason to believe the various types of intervention did any harm, except they cautioned against the excessive use of digital technology. The authors called for more rigorous, best practice compliant research in future studies, and with more attention to the cost of interventions. History Loneliness has been a theme in literature throughout the ages, as far back as Epic of Gilgamesh. Yet according to Fay Bound Alberti, it was only around the year 1800 that the word began to widely denote a negative condition. With some exceptions, earlier writings and dictionary definitions of loneliness tended to equate it with solitude – a state that was often seen as positive, unless taken to excess. From about 1800, the word loneliness began to acquire its modern definition as a painful subjective condition. This may be due to the economic and social changes arising out of the enlightenment. Such as alienation and increased interpersonal competition, along with a reduction in the proportion of people enjoying close and enduring connections with others living in close proximity, as may for example have been the case for modernising pastoral villages. Despite growing awareness of the problem of loneliness, widespread social recognition of the problem remained limited, and scientific study was sparse, until the last quarter of the twentieth century. One of the earliest studies of loneliness was published by Joseph Harold Sheldon in 1948. The 1950 book The Lonely Crowd helped further raise the profile of loneliness among academics. For the general public, awareness was raised by the 1966 Beatles song "Eleanor Rigby". According to Eugene Garfield, it was Robert S. Weiss who brought the attention of scientists to the topic of loneliness, with his 1973 publication of Loneliness: The experience of emotional and social isolation. Before Weiss's publication, what few studies of loneliness existed were mostly focussed on older adults. Following Weis's work, and especially after the 1978 publication of the UCLA Loneliness Scale, scientific interest in the topic has broadened and deepened considerably, with tens of thousands of academic studies having been carried to investigate loneliness just among students, with many more focussed on other subgroups, and on whole populations. Concern among the general public over loneliness increased in the decades since "Eleanor Rigby"'s release; by 2018 government-backed anti-loneliness campaigns had been launched in countries including the UK, Denmark and Australia. See also Solitude Shyness