
The brains of lonely people respond more negatively to social stimuli - acsillag
http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-research-on-overcoming-loneliness-1442854148
======
Udo
At this time, about 70% of people who answered the poll on that page said
they're lonely. Of course there is an obvious selection bias, but even so I
find that number troubling. Loneliness is different from being alone, or
single, or being a loner - it's a painful feeling of social isolation.

I wonder if those articles encouraging people to "just get over themselves"
and be social are conveying the wrong message entirely. For some people that
advice might be outright harmful. The more you're being told your salvation is
other people, the more your pain and isolation grow. The media introduces yet
another yardstick for you to fall short of.

At the extreme ends of the spectrum there are socialite extroverts, and
eremites with no social desires, respectively. But most people fall in
between. Being in a group (or a relationship for that matter) is not the
universal cure for _Weltschmerz_. For most people, there is a balance between
being social and being a lone individual, meaning you need both in a ratio
that is appropriate to you.

~~~
mbrutsch
Some of us lack social skills. I've struggled my entire life with this
problem, and have barely learned to "fake it" well enough to pass as a normie.

Also, small towns in the South offer only one place for communal gatherings,
church, and I don't do church.

~~~
Retra
I've been accused of having poor social skills, but I think that's a rude
enough thing to accuse someone of that it just screams hypocrisy.

I've been told my quietness makes people uncomfortable, but telling people
that they are being quiet is... supposed to achieve what? That's not a way to
start a conversation, it just puts people into a defensive mode. How graceful!

I've been told I don't smile enough. I would be a poor comedian indeed if I
went on stage demanding that people laugh simply because they paid for the
seats like it's an obligation.

I have perfectly fine social skills. I just know what my priorities are, and
I'm not willing to pretend you are one just because you'd like me to. I don't
value that inconsistency.

~~~
ndhc3
>I just know what my priorities are, and I'm not willing to pretend you are
one just because you'd like me to.

That's what having good social skills is.

~~~
Retra
I wouldn't say you had bad basketball skills just because you have better
things to do than play the game with me.

There _are_ people who are a priority to me, and they seem to like my social
skills just fine. And if someone wants that out of me, they aren't going to
get there by telling me I have poor social skills or that I don't smile
enough. That's burning your bridges, and not an example of someone in a
position to offer criticism.

~~~
cortesoft
If you refused to ever play basketball, I WOULD say you have bad basketball
skills. You can only have skills if you play.

~~~
Retra
I _do_ play, just not when you want me to.

~~~
irishcoffee
You are contradicting yourself.

If you stop playing basketball halfway through a game, and your rationale is
"I do what I want, not what you guys want" you have _both_ poor basketball
skills _and_ bad social skills.

~~~
brazzledazzle
I think your analogy is being taken too far and is starting to unravel.

------
cLeEOGPw
The conclusion is entirely not based on results from this study, if it can be
called a proper study.

What can be told from the abstract, is that sample size is extremely small (19
individuals), there don't seem to be any control parameters and the
distinction of "lonely" and "not lonely" is made based on self reporting,
which is yet another source of potential errors.

Other than that, the subject studied was reaction speed, which can be
interpreted as basic alertness, and even if we consider the results reliable,
which we can't, the conclusion could be made almost entirely different -
lonely people are more alert to their surroundings, while non-lonely are more
calm and relaxed.

I'm not sure who are reviewing these studies, but it would never pass as a
conclusive study by any standards in non-social sciences.

~~~
Osmium
> is that sample size is extremely small (19 individuals)

This is not meaningful. I'm not sure why this keeps getting repeated, but it's
entirely possible to get significant results from small sample sizes. No
comment on the rest of the study, but I just don't think sample sizes are
worth mentioning, and I wouldn't even call that "extremely small". This is
what significance testing is for, after all.

With regards to self-reporting, I read a very nice defence on this in a book
on the scientific study of consciousness [1], which basically says that we
need to let go of this idea that self-reporting is somehow "unscientific",
because some phenomena only exist as experiences (and I'd think loneliness is
one of them), and therefore the scientific study of these experiences has to
incorporate self-reporting on some level. You can't get a blood test for
loneliness.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_and_the_Brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_and_the_Brain)

~~~
wpietri
I don't think self-reporting is unscientific, but I do think it's not
particularly reliable. Reported loneliness may correlate with actual
loneliness, but they're different phenomena.

This was really driven home to me in doing product development and user
testing. I've worked with some great user researchers, and they were extremely
skeptical about self-reported characteristics. The classic example is, "Would
you buy X?" People are terrible at answering that correctly and honestly. But
there were a bunch more where we carefully rigged situations so we could
measure behavior rather than self-reported internal state, because behavior
ended up being a better measure of internal state for us. I could well believe
the same is true for loneliness.

I'd also disagree that some phenomena only exist as experiences. As far as we
know, all experiences are also physical states in the brain. We currently may
not have the tools to usefully read that physical state. We may not have a
blood test for loneliness, but we may one day have a brain scan for it. Or,
perhaps sooner, a pattern in the sort of data that will be gathered by the
iPhone 15m (the "m" being for medical, of course).

~~~
JoeAltmaier
This! We find focus groups nearly useless; folks are so eager to please. You
get nothing but "Yes this is great. Maybe change the color to yellow". But you
learn nothing about what would really appeal or sell.

I'm thinking focus groups should change to some sort of psychological test
situation. "You can take only one of these home for free. Which one do you
want?" I.e. perceived scarcity (cost) would elicit honest responses.

~~~
wpietri
Yeah, I have never found focus groups of any value. I don't understand how one
separates social effects from actual effects. And many user researchers agree.
E.g.:

[https://medium.com/research-things/focus-groups-are-
worthles...](https://medium.com/research-things/focus-groups-are-
worthless-7d30891e58f1)

------
yason
_My new anti-loneliness antidote? I adopted a puppy. Scout demands that we get
out of the house—multiple times a day. She happily makes friends with everyone
she meets. And if the people we meet like Scout, it is a pretty good bet I
will like them._

I don't know the author's background but this surely is no way to reduce
loneliness in itself. Loneliness is, as I see it, about _not having a good
friend or partner with whom build a meaningful_ friendship or relationship.

Loneliness is about quality and no amount of quantity doesn't make it go away.

Of course, you can't find quality unless you wade through enough quantity but
meeting new people is consuming in itself. Thus, a natural balance will
establish itself. You will spend some time finding friends, and probably a lot
more time to just go by life yourself.

Also, unless you become your own best friend first it's really hard to build a
friendship where you see each other not because you need each other but
because you enjoy each others' company so as to choose spend time together.
This is where I might suggest that you can't fix loneliness by finding friends
per se.

~~~
anigbrowl
I'm a deeply unsocial person who's often lonely, and unexpectedly got a dog a
few years back. My 2c on this:

a. the physical exercise that a dog needs is also good for you and can help
stave off the depression that can easily accompany loneliness.

b. social interaction is tiring for some people. How you got your dog, what
your dog is like and so on is an easy, low-effort conversation to have, and
it's also one that can be managed without causing offense - if you're tired or
having a bad day, you can always cite a need to walk the dog home. This allows
you to enjoy some friendly conversation without needing to locate it in any
kind of semantic framework (eg 'is this person being friendly or just
networking with me').

c. dogs are very generous emotionally and also very reliable. They will try to
trick you into playing ball or possibly destroy on of your shoes and try to
hide it, but basically you don't need to second-guess them the way you do
people (including yourself). Your dog doesn't care what anyone else thinks of
you and likes seeing you happy. It may be a simple friendship but it's a very
sincere one.

d. over time, your dog is in many ways a reflection of you, a four-legged
psychological mirror, if you like. If you choose, you can learn and adjust
things about yourself through observing how your dog responds to you. If you
need to make life changes, your dog doesn't need you to explain them.

So while a dog won't cure loneliness, they're excellent at helping you deal
with it.

------
Kenji
>Accept social invitations, even if you don’t feel like going out.

>It isn’t enough to rely on random invites. Get your calendar out and map out
your social life. Make sure your week is scattered with social activities.

This is the worst advice possible. I did this when I was a freshman at uni.
Just saying yes to every invitation. Disco, birthday party, cinema, whatever.
I thought it'd reduce the loneliness. But I never ever enjoyed it, and I felt
lonelier than ever before. Then, at some point, I got a tinnitus from a disco
visit. It's not loud, luckily, and I can barely make it out throughout the
day, but it's there. But that was when everything changed. I started saying no
to everything. Now, I maintain very few relationships but they're much deeper.
And I'm happier like that. Don't ever say yes to things that don't feel right.

~~~
netcan
College may be a bad example, social interactions are pretty available
generally speaking. I think this advice is more targeted at people who are
going long stretches with big, psychologically dangerous holes in their social
"nutritional diet." This can happen much more easily later on.

That doesn't mean go to night clubs when you hate them, but it does mean that
if you rely on chance, you could go without for a long time. You could join a
book club, a political party, volunteer in a kennel, do street art, join a
architectural restoration organization, boxing club, sex club or anything that
you _do_ like. The thing is that you need to plan something that will include
the types of social interactions that you need for psychological health, if
they are not serendipitously available in your lifestyle at a point in time.

------
acqq
The original research article is:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26274315](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26274315)

"Loneliness and implicit attention to social threat: A high-performance
electrical neuroimaging study; Cacioppo S, Bangee M, Balogh S, Cardenas-
Iniguez C, Qualter P, Cacioppo JT."

Note that the researches explicitly don't evaluate the reactions as being
"more negative." They measured the speed of the threat detection in ms: 100 ms
vs 250 ms.

"Abstract: Prior research has suggested that loneliness is associated with an
implicit hypervigilance to social threats-an assumption in line with the
evolutionary model of loneliness that indicates feeling socially isolated (or
on the social perimeter) leads to increased attention and surveillance of the
social world and an unwitting focus on self-preservation. Little is known,
however, about the temporal dynamics for social threat (vs. nonsocial threat)
in the lonely brains. We used high-density electrical neuroimaging and a
behavioral task including social and nonsocial threat (and neutral) pictures
to investigate the brain dynamics of implicit processing for social threat vs.
nonsocial threat stimuli in lonely participants (N = 10), compared to
nonlonely individuals (N = 9). The present study provides evidence that social
threat images are differentiated from nonsocial threat stimuli more quickly in
the lonely (~116 ms after stimulus onset) than nonlonely (~252 ms after
stimulus onset) brains. That speed of threat processing in lonely individuals
is in accord with the evolutionary model of loneliness. Brain source estimates
expanded these results by suggesting that lonely (but not nonlonely)
individuals showed early recruitment of brain areas involved in attention and
self-representation."

~~~
pbhjpbhj
From the article, not the paper:

>"seven were nonsocial and positive (pleasant scenery) and seven were
nonsocial and negative (snakes)"

This seems kinda flawed as far as designing the experiment to present threat
and non-threat stimulii. If you're an agoraphobic serpentophile then you're
not seeing things the same, surely. People are going to be on a spectrum of
finding scenery panoramas to be hugely positive to finding them hugely
negative??

What strikes me is that "Dr. Cacioppo" (whichever of the couple that is)
doesn't seem to have a clue what loneliness is like, nor having no friends.
All the suggestions assume you have time and money to spend too; perhaps
that's right for a WSJ audience. "Accept social invitations, even if you don’t
feel like going out." seems quite clueless, are their people who're lonely but
are getting social invitations and have friends they can call and make plans
with?

The abstract suggests a moderately interesting preliminary finding, assuming
the ten lonely people didn't also respond faster to the other stimulii. A
wider study to confirm the result and then a new experiment to establish
causation seem like the next moves (if they can be funded). You'd probably
need a longitudinal study to see if speed of response to "social threats"
changes as people become, or perceive themselves to be, more/less lonely.

~~~
acqq
> assuming the ten lonely people didn't also respond faster to the other
> stimuli

Yes, that's important to control in a properly performed experiment. I don't
have the access to the whole paper, maybe somebody who does will write here
with more details.

> doesn't seem to have a clue what loneliness is like, nor having no friends.
> All the suggestions assume you have time and money to spend too; perhaps
> that's right for a WSJ audience. "Accept social invitations, even if you
> don’t feel like going out." seems quite clueless

It seems you are the one who reads that as "time and money." I read this only
as, if somebody calls you to come out and play, don't say "thanks I'll rather
play with myself." (heh) And typically we have more opportunities to do
something than we accept or even recognize as such. Yes, it's hard to do
anything but the work if our work week is 80 work hours, but it's also
something that we have to care about and not use as an excuse for doing
nothing but the work and as the only purpose of our lives. The article also
mentions "get your calendar out and map out your social life."

> "Dr. Cacioppo" (whichever of the couple that is)

It's in the article: "John Cacioppo, professor of psychology, psychiatry and
behavioral neuroscience and director of the Center for Cognitive and Social
Neuroscience at the University of Chicago."

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I literally have no money to have a social life, I could get more money but
that would require less time. Around work, caring for family and other duties
there's no time left and no energy left to make the huge effort of finding
someone to kickback with.

But yes, making a conscious effort not to shrink back at an opportunity is
good - the general feel however is that they're addressing people who
socialise, who have a cadre of friends but who feel lonely. Perhaps this group
exists(?) but it seems it would be a thin sliver compared to the group who
feel lonely because they haven't friends and don't have a social life at all.

Per the last point "two new studies by the husband and wife research team John
and Stephanie Cacioppo, psychologists at the University of Chicago". Perhaps
she's a professor or other title but when referencing in subsequent paras I
think it's necessary to specify Dr John Cacioppo (or whatever)?

------
waterhouse
A proposition I have come up with: Loneliness is wanting or needing some
particular kind of interaction with other people, and not getting it.
(Consequently there are different kinds of loneliness for each different
desired interaction.)

... I would try to compare this with the content of the article, but I find it
difficult to interpret. First, the title appears at odds with the studies:
"respond more negatively to social stimuli", without qualifiers, implies "to
[all] social stimuli"; while the studies apparently showed "electrical
activity ... was more extreme than that of non-lonely people when shown
_negative_ social cues", rather different from _all_.

Second, its presentation of the studies seems to be cut off: it describes the
precise setup of each study, the numbers of people in each group and of
positive/negative, social/nonsocial words, and then goes into general
commentary. The only description of the results that we have is three
paragraphs earlier, where it says the abovementioned about "lonely =>
negative-social is even worse" but doesn't mention the other outcomes. I don't
see a link to either study. In theory I could assume that the fact that she
didn't mention the other outcomes was because lonely people were equivalent to
non-lonely people in the other scenarios, but the inappropriate title and the
way that it's presented as a non-technical article for non-technical people
don't give me faith in such an assumption. So unfortunately I don't have much
to go on.

(Actually, it sort of looks like someone took a technical article summarizing
the studies, and a "discussion and advice aimed at a general audience", and
interleaved several paragraphs from the former into the latter. Well, anyway.)

~~~
louithethrid
What are you pritching here? Cinder for Communication?

Desperatly searching for somebody else in a existenzialistic mood - feeling
very depressed?

------
naiyt
> You cannot connect if you isolate yourself—or if you only connect online
> where many people present a non-authentic self.

I agree that you shouldn't only connect with people online, but people can be
just as non-authentic in real life as they are online...

~~~
Lawtonfogle
If anything I find people putting on a face more offline. Online, you can be
yourself with far less consequences thanks to anonymity. Yes, this leads to
some showing they are horrible people, but it lets others show vulnerable
sides they are too scared to show face to face.

------
bagelwhiteoff
This is a biased modern American perspective: if you're lonely or have no
friends, you're probably depressed because you 'failed' in life.

For me, and many others, loneliness is a blessing that has helped me do things
most ignore: exercising, reading about Philosophy, developing ventures,etc.
Plus, I'm never 'bounded' to my social circle and have resided in 11
countries.

By the way, I look like an innate salesman. Always smiling, making jokes,
building a network, etc. Still, I'd rather be on my own.

~~~
huck_cussler
I would argue that what you describe as loneliness is not loneliness, but
being content to be alone.

~~~
bagelwhiteoff
I found out that my first language apparently doesn't make a distinction of
it. I tried to find synonyms, but none was able to grasp such difference.
That's fascinating.

~~~
mirimir
So your first language doesn't distinguish between "being alone" and
"loneliness"? What is the word, if I may ask? Or at least, what is the
emotional tone? Is it neutral, or negative?

~~~
bagelwhiteoff
The word is 'solitudine'. Wiki quote:

'In lingua inglese il concetto viene espresso con due differenti vocaboli,
solitude e loneliness, che si riferiscono rispettivamente al piacere e al
dolore provati in condizioni di esclusione'

'In English, the concept is expressed by two words, solitude and loneliness,
which refer to pleasure and pain in the condition of exclusion.

~~~
mirimir
Thanks. I'm struck by the Wikipedia entry on the song "La solitudine" by Laura
Pausini: "The lyrics to the Italian version of the song where are about a boy
named Marco, who is separated from his girlfriend at the urging of his family
and sent to live far away from her. The now former girlfriend makes an
emotional and heartfelt plea, singing to him about the loneliness and pain
they would feel without each other."[0] So that's clearly about feeling
lonely, aka loneliness.

But the article goes on to say: "The English-language version of the song,
adapted by Tim Rice, has a completely different meaning, and it doesn't
contain any reference to Marco. Its lyrics are focused on the feelings of
those who want to be alone in order to better understand themselves."

But what I get is that the Italian word "solitudine" is ambiguous, meaning
both, in tension, with awareness at multiple levels. In English, one is forced
to choose: solitude (chosen, positive) vs loneliness (imposed, negative).
English probably takes after German in that, I'm guessing.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_solitudine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_solitudine)

------
Xcelerate
> "It is important to be self-aware about what loneliness does to your brain —
> that it primes it to be hypervigilant to threats and go into self-
> preservation mode. Feeling lonely might mean you need to reinterpret your
> view of your social interactions, says Dr. Cacioppo. For example, if you
> feel a friend has slighted you, ask yourself if you were actually hostile
> and in an isolation mode first and your friend is reacting to your behavior.
> “You need to understand that you may be responsible,” says Dr. Cacioppo."

Interesting. This suggestion sounds very similar to advice given to those
diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (a condition that's thus far
resisted all attempts at being renamed "emotional dysregulation disorder").
Recent research seems to indicate that the defining features of BPD are: 1)
the presence of emotions that are disproportionately negative and intense for
the situations that caused them and 2) an inability to subdue those negative
emotions and alleviate anxiety.

In other words, if a family member routinely says "I love you" at the end of
every phone call but forgets to say it one time, then there's a decent chance
that someone with BPD would start wondering if their relative hates them for
some reason.

------
strumplet
Society assuredly isn't your friend. The assumption behind its behaviour seems
to be: 'So-and-so is unsocial and therefore unfriendly, and so, in the name of
friendliness, we must denigrate/exclude this person.'

~~~
chucksmash
Society doesn't exist in this context and therefore it can have no
assumptions. You are dealing with individuals. Individuals with limited time,
energy and maybe even limited social abilities.

If someone reads as aloof and disinterested, how are you as an individual
going to disambiguate between them being scared of social situations vs them
being truly disinterested? Always remember that the other side of the social
interaction is another person with their own inner life - they aren't just the
particular face of "society" that is presenting itself to you.

~~~
strumplet
Of course society exists in the in the context of a discussion of loneliness
and social life, why wouldn't it? Also, people's social behaviour is
controlled by memes of which they are unaware, so their inner lives can be
disregarded for social purposes.

The one part of the article that makes sense is the definition of loneliness;
that it happens where there's a gap between one's social relationships and
one's desired social relationships.

My point was to try and reduce that gap not by increasing social skill and
exposure but by being honest about the value of social life. Actually I think
highly social people and lonely people both share the somewhat conflicting
assumptions that society is cruel and that social life is the be-all and end-
all. In the former case the response is to 'get with the winners', in the
latter to withdraw. Both will ultimately end up frustrated if they fail to
develop the inner life you mention.

~~~
chucksmash
My point was that you don't deal with society directly, you deal with
individual people. Ignoring their personal motivations and grouping everybody
who isn't you into "society" doesn't sound like a productive way to interact
with individuals.

Because of this, discussing society and whether it is or isn't your friend in
this context makes as much sense to me as discussing whether the Grand Tetons
are your friend.

Essentially, when I hear "it's them versus you and they don't like you much"
(my reading of your first post) I hear a lot of alienation and I don't think
it's a useful framework for helping lonely people make sense of the world.

Thanks for taking the time to explain what you meant.

~~~
anigbrowl
You are right about the fact that ultimately we deal with individuals, but we
are also quite good at assessing how invested individuals are in social norms
and (to a lesser extent) predicting how that degree of investment is likely to
bias your relations with them.

------
Kiro
People would consider me lonely but I don't feel lonely, at all. I may be
asocial but not lonely. Where does that put me?

~~~
epidemian
> Where does that put me?

Into the "content being alone" category the article mentions.

------
jokoon
A guy once yelled "wooo" at me while he in his car because I was crossing the
road. I just flipped him off the finger because I just felt insulted.

Looking back he seemed he was just joking.

