Psychologist Examines the Profound Power of Loneliness

Newswise, March 3, 2016 — Loneliness is as close to universal as experiences come. Almost everyone has felt isolated, even rejected.

But the power of loneliness — its potential for causing depression and other serious health problems as well as its surprising role in keeping humans safe from harm — may be more profound than researchers had previously presumed, says neuroscience researcher John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago.

Cacioppo has spent nearly three decades exploring the social nature of the human brain, working to find the mechanisms behind traits such as loneliness, empathy, synchrony and emotional contagion.

Through his research, funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, and the National Institute on Aging, he’s helped turn loneliness from a curious afterthought in neuroscience to a serious area for research and explanation.

He and his collaborators have also incorporated new technology at each stage of their research, combining methods ranging from behavior studies to endocrinological testing, electrical and functional neuroimaging, and genetics. They’re using those tools to identify the neural, hormonal, cellular and genetic mechanisms underlying social structures.

Using what they’ve learned, Cacioppo’s team is evaluating therapies for loneliness, finding the most effective treatments and working to improve them.

The researchers’ collaborators include the U.S. Army, which turned to Cacioppo for help with studies that could be incorporated into training to help protect soldiers from isolation and related social problems.

During a visit to the NSF, Cacioppo took some time to talk about loneliness — what it is, where it comes from and how it affects people.

Q. How do you define loneliness, in terms of your work?

A. It's defined as perceived social isolation. People can feel like they’re on the social perimeter for a lot of different reasons. If you’re the last one chosen on a high school team, that can feel really unpleasant. It’s also clearly an evaluation of your net worth to that group. If that’s a valued group, it matters to you. If it’s not a valued group, it’s no big deal. That has effects on not just emotions but cognition. Research at Rush University has shown that older adults are more likely to develop dementia if they feel chronic loneliness.

Q. So just the perception, not whether or not someone is actually isolated, can trigger a physiological reaction?

A. Much of what goes with loneliness — behaviorally, physiologically — is so deep that we’ve got it in our genes. It’s just like if I were to provide a painful stimulus to your arm, you would withdraw and complain of being hurt. That’s not something you learn. The pain withdrawal reflex is in place due to your genetic endowment. And that mechanism is in place because it protects your body from tissue damage.

Loneliness is a mechanism that’s in place because we need, as a social species, to be able to identify when our connections with others for mutual aid and protection are being threatened or absent. If there’s no connection, there could be mortal consequences. Those are threats to our survival and reproductive success.

Q. Does that make loneliness almost like a fever — unpleasant, but there's a purpose to it?

A. That’s exactly right. You would not want to eliminate the temporary feeling of loneliness. We’ve argued there’s a benefit to that response to perceived isolation. But, like many individual variations of these kinds of states, there are pathologic extremes. I might be so sensitive to feeling connected or isolated as to be a complete wreck, or I can be so insensitive as to be a psychopath. That’s just part of the normal distribution of individual differences that, for the most part, helps to protect our social body just as pain helps to protect our physical body.

Q. How does loneliness affect our social behavior and interactions?

A. When you feel lonely, you get more defensive. You focus more on self-preservation even though this is not done intentionally. Completely unbeknownst to you, your brain is focusing more on self-preservation than the preservation of those around you. This, in turn, can make you less pleasant to be around. Over time, this can increase the likelihood of negative social interactions. Thus, the focus on self-preservation can have short-term survival benefits but — if not reversed — can have long-term costs.

Q. It seems that loneliness can serve a useful purpose but — almost like an immune system that starts attacking things that aren't actually threats — it can go out of control.

A. That’s exactly right. It’s also very much like our stress system. Our stress system emerged in a different time of human history, and now we get stressed when we’re in traffic. There’s no saber-toothed tiger attacking; there’s no person with a spear coming to get me. I'm sitting in a safe car, but there’s still that level of stress and hostility that a traffic jam can engender. Our stress response contributed to survival across human history, but in contemporary society chronic stress also contributes to morbidity and mortality.

Stress has an adaptive value, even today, although not to the extent we’re expressing it. But knowing that does not mean we can simply turn it off when we wish. It’s the same thing with loneliness. We’re trying to educate the public about this, to say that loneliness isn’t something that only certain individuals have. It’s something we all have, we can all fall into, and nearly all of us experience at some point in our lives.

Q. Does this type of research into loneliness tell us anything about humans as a species?

A. The perception of loneliness is exacerbated by the feeling that one doesn’t have anyone on whom he or she can depend or who can depend on him or her. As children, we’re dependent on adults. When we grow to be adults, we think we’re supposed to become independent — the king of the mountain. But in social mammals -- not just humans — becoming an adult means being the individual upon whom others can depend. Our Western cultural notion of human nature does not capture our actual social nature particularly well.

Q. When you were starting your research into isolation decades ago, behavioral science and brain science weren't as closely linked as they are today, correct?

A. There were a number of people trying to put them together, but we didn’t have the neuroimaging technologies we have today that have really transformed what we can ask. Today, someone can really look at the working, normal brain.

I was doing electroencephalography (EEG) 40 years ago, and we looked at very broad questions. I was doing it 20 years ago, and we looked at relatively sophisticated questions compared to 20 years prior, but not very sophisticated compared to today. I’m now asking questions about the whole brain in action rather than a single region in isolation. And genetics and genomics are also increasingly integrated into investigations of the social brain.

Q. The questions that you started asking at the very beginning of your research — have they led you on a linear path to where you are today? Or has your research taken you in unexpected directions?

A. Yes to both. The question we started with wasn’t about loneliness and continues to not be about loneliness. It’s about who we are as a species. What, fundamentally, are our brains doing? What are the factors that influence brain function? Partly, we’re showing that the brain is organized in part to deal with and to promote salutary connections to other people. The fundamental question was “what is the social nature of our brain?”

One of the things that surprised me was how important loneliness proved to be. It predicted morbidity. It predicted mortality. And that shocked me. When we experimentally manipulated loneliness, we found surprising changes in the “personalities” of people. There's a lot more power to the perception of being socially isolated than any of us had thought.— Rob Marietta, National Science Foundation

Testosterone Treatment Improves Sexual Activity, Physical Function and Mood in Men Over 65

Newswise, February 19, 2016 – As men age, their testosterone levels decrease, but prior studies of the effects of administering testosterone to older men have been inconclusive.

Now, a new study shows testosterone treatment for men age 65 and older improves sexual function, walking ability and mood, according to findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine by a team of researchers from 12 medical centers, including Cora E. Lewis, M.D., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The Testosterone Trials, or TTrials, are a coordinated group of seven trials, and researchers have analyzed the results of the first three — sexual function, physical function and vitality. They found that testosterone treatment increased the blood testosterone level in the study subjects to the mid-normal range for younger men.

Testosterone treatment led to modest improvements in all aspects of sexual function, including sexual activity, sexual desire and the ability to get an erection. It also resulted in small improvements in indexes of mood and depression and some but not all measures of physical function. Treatment did not improve overall energy level.

With 51,085 men screened and 790 who qualified, the TTrials are now the largest trials to examine the efficacy of testosterone treatment in men 65 and older whose testosterone levels are low due seemingly to age alone.

Lewis, a professor in the UAB Division of Preventive Medicine and co-author on the testosterone study, says this new research fills a prominent gap in the evidence for the possible benefits of testosterone in men in this age group, a gap identified by a 2003 report from the Institute of Medicine. Additional evidence will come from the studies in other trials on cognitive function, bone health, cardiovascular disease and anemia.

“We now have some evidence on the specific symptoms that seem to respond, or don’t respond, to testosterone therapy in men 65 years old and over,” Lewis said. “However, there are still big questions about overall benefits and risks. The negative effects of testosterone treatment are still unclear.”

Across the three trials, adverse events including heart attack, stroke and prostate problems were similar in men who received testosterone and men who received placebo. So, while the TTrials did not find harmful effects, Lewis says a larger and longer clinical trial comparing testosterone therapy to placebo to definitively assess the risks is needed.

Lewis says men considering testosterone treatment should consult their doctor.

“Men should discuss their symptoms and their health history with their doctor since testosterone treatment seems to affect some symptoms and not others,” she said. “Men should have their testosterone levels checked to be sure they have low testosterone.”

She also adds that it is important to have levels checked in the morning since testosterone levels naturally change over the course of a day.

The TTrials were supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health and funding from other institutes of the NIH. 

Anonymous Browsing Hinders Online Dating Signals

Newswise, February 10, 2016 — Big data and the growing popularity of online dating sites may be reshaping a fundamental human activity: finding a mate, or at least a date. Yet a new study in Management Science finds that certain longstanding social norms persist, even online.

In a large-scale experiment conducted through a major North American online dating website, a team of management scholars from Canada, the U.S. and Taiwan examined the impact of a premium feature: anonymous browsing. 

Out of 100,000 randomly selected new users, 50,000 were given free access to the feature for a month, enabling them to view profiles of other users without leaving telltale digital traces.

The researchers expected the anonymity feature to lower social inhibitions -- and apparently it did. Compared to the control group, users with anonymous browsing viewed more profiles. They were also more likely to check out potential same-sex and interracial matches.

Surprisingly, however, users who browsed anonymously also wound up with fewer matches (defined as a sequence of at least three messages exchanged between users) than their non-anonymous counterparts. 

This was especially true for female users: those with anonymous browsing wound up with an average of 14% fewer matches. Why?

Women don’t like to send personal messages to initiate contact, explains Jui Ramaprasad, an assistant professor of information systems at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management. 

In other words, she says, “We still see that women don’t make the first move.” Instead, they tend to send what the researchers call a “weak signal.”

“Weak signaling is the ability to visit, or ‘check out,’ a potential mate’s profile so the potential mate knows the focal user visited,” according to the study. 

“The offline ‘flirting’ equivalents, at best, would be a suggestive look or a preening bodily gesture such as a hair toss to one side or an over-the-shoulder glance, each subject to myriad interpretations and possible misinterpretations contingent on the perceptiveness of the players involved. 

"Much less ambiguity exists in the online environment if the focal user views another user’s profile and leaves a visible train in his ‘Recent Visitors’ list.”

Men often take the cue. “Men send four times the number of messages that women do,” says co-author Akhmed Umyarov, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. “So the anonymity feature doesn’t change things so much for men.”

Implications beyond online dating

Experiments of this sort could be used in a range of online-matching platforms to help understand how to improve the consumer experience – though it’s important that the experiments be done ethically, the researchers say.

“Even though people are willing to pay to become anonymous in online dating sites, we find that the feature is detrimental to the average users,” says Professor Ravi Bapna, co-author and the Carlson Chair in Business Analytics and Information Systems at Minnesota. 

”Professional social networks, such as LinkedIn, also offer different levels of anonymity, but user behavior and the underlying psychology in these settings is very different from that of romantic social networks.”
.
As with many academic research projects, the idea for this experiment stemmed partly from serendipity.

“I happened to know a senior guy at an online dating site,” Ramaprasad explains. 

“Since he knew that I studied online behavior, he suggested, ‘Why don’t you study this?’” The site, referred to in the study by the fictitious name of monCherie.com, is one of the largest online dating websites in North America.

The study could lay the groundwork for further academic analysis of online dating sites. 

“We expect future research to examine in more depth the issue of match quality and long-term outcomes as they relate to marriage, happiness, long-term relationships, and divorce,” the researchers conclude.

“One-Way Mirrors and Weak-Signaling in Online Dating: A Randomized Field Experiment,” Ravi Bapna, Jui Ramaprasad, Galit Shmueli, Akhmed Umyarov. Management Science, published online Feb. 2, 2016.
www.pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2301

UF/IFAS Researcher Says Some People Are Single on Valentine’s Day and Just Fine with It

 There are ways to short-circuit the “mind traps” that often accompany a day set aside for couples

Newswise, February 10, 2016--- With the most hyped romantic day of the year fast approaching, some people who are single are perfectly happy that way – and not buying into the all the ads, stuffed animals, candies or cards.

Assistant Professor Victor Harris, an Extension specialist with the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences’ Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences, said there are ways to short-circuit the “mind traps” that often accompany a day set aside for couples.

“Many people feel like Valentine's Day is manufactured and that the need to ‘have to be involved in a romantic relationship’ is imposed upon them by the media and the holiday's specific expectations,” Harris said. 

“Exposing the hype associated with these expectations and reframing the expectations into expectations that are more realistic are two ways to make it okay to simply ignore the holiday or enjoy it with friends, or choose do something you enjoy, such as working out or reading a good book, without the associated potential for anxiety or guilt.”

Harris said people can avoid the mind traps that can keep them from enjoying Valentine's Day. Recognizing these traps is the first step to short-circuiting them. 

They include:

• All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black-or-white. If a situation is anything less than perfect, you see it as a total failure;
• Overgeneralization: You see a single event as a never-ending pattern of defeat by using the words always or never when you think about it;
• Jumping to conclusions: You interpret things negatively when there are no facts to support your conclusions;
• Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions reflect the way things really are: “I feel guilty [because I don't have a date for Valentine's Day]. I must be a rotten person.”;
• “Should” statements: You tell yourself that things ‘should’ be the way you hoped or expected them to be.

Harris cites the popular line, “you complete me,” from the Tom Cruise movie “Jerry Maguire.”

“This expectation is unrealistic because the key to healthy relationships is to first learn how to meet your own needs so you can then help someone else learn how to meet their needs,” Harris said. “Two people getting together in a relationship, who don't know how to meet their own needs, is a sure-fire recipe for failure.”

Harris said research in the work, “Developing a healthy self-image,” identified eight categories of needs that we can work on to enjoy and value ourselves before we get involved with someone else in a relationship, including:
• Feel safe and secure;
• Develop a positive self-concept;
• Feel worthwhile (i.e., good self-esteem);
• Receive the respect of self and others;
• Develop close real-love relationships;
• Feel like we belong;
• Feel competent;
• And experience growth.

“Once you learn to take care of and nurture yourself, only then can you be in a healthy, positive relationship,” he said. “And it is perfectly fine to be by yourself on Valentine’s Day – or any day of the year.”

In Married Couples, Death May Not Entirely Do You Part

A person's quality of life at the time of their death continues to influence his or her spouse's quality of life in the years following the person's passing, according to new research by UA psychologists

Newswise, January 21, 2016 — As married couples spend day in and day out together, they begin to experience a level of interdependence in which one spouse's quality of life is very closely tied to that of the other.

This interdependence persists even after the death of one spouse, according to new research from the University of Arizona.

A person's quality of life at the time of their death continues to influence his or her spouse's quality of life in the years following the person's passing, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

What's more, the association between a deceased and surviving spouse is just as strong as the association between partners who are both living, the researchers found.

"If your partner has higher quality of life before they pass away, you're more likely to have higher quality of life even after they're gone," said Kyle Bourassa, a UA psychology doctoral student and lead author of the paper.

"If he or she has lower quality of life before they pass away, you're then more likely to have lower quality of life."

In previous work, Bourassa and his colleagues found evidence that a person’s cognitive functioning and health influence not only his or her own well-being but also the well-being of his or her partner. They wondered whether this interdependence continues when one of the partners passes away.

To find out, they turned to the multinational, representative Study of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, or SHARE, an ongoing research project with more than 80,000 aging adult participants across 18 European countries and Israel.

Specifically, they examined data from 546 couples in which one partner had died during the study period and data from 2,566 couples in which both partners were still living.

The researchers were surprised to find no observable difference in the strength of the interdependence in couples' quality of life when comparing widowed spouses with spouses whose partners remained alive. They replicated these findings in two independent samples from the SHARE study, while controlling for other factors that might have played a role, such as participants' health, age and number of years married.

"Even though your marriage ends in a literal sense when you lose your spouse, the effects of who the person was still seems to matter even after they're gone," Bourassa said. "I think that really says something about how important those relationships are."

While it's not entirely clear why the interdependence persists, it's likely that the thoughts and emotions a person experiences when reminiscing about a lost spouse may contribute to the ongoing connection, the researchers say.

"Relationships are something we develop over time and they are retained in our mind and memory and understanding of the world, and that continues even after physical separation," said Mary-Frances O'Connor, UA assistant professor of psychology and a co-author of the paper who specializes in grief and the grieving process.

Bourassa said the findings could have implications for end-of-life care and for helping those who have lost their spouses. "If you can boost someone's quality of life before they pass, that might affect not just their life, but the quality of life of their partner and their family."

Other authors on the paper were David Sbarra, UA associate professor of psychology, and Lindsey M. Knowles, UA psychology doctoral student.

Qualities admired in another from far away can be threatening as that person approaches, according to UB research

Newswise, November 2, 2015 — What people believe they want and what they might actually prefer are not always the same thing. And in the case of being outperformed as an element of romantic attraction, the difference between genuine affinity and apparent desirability becomes clearer as the distance between two people gets smaller.

In matters of relative performance, distance influences attraction. For example, someone of greater intelligence seems attractive when they’re distant or far away in your mind. But less so when that same person is right next to you, according to a new study by a University at Buffalo-led research team published in the latest edition of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 

“We found that men preferred women who are smarter than them in psychologically distant situations. Men rely on their ideal preferences when a woman is hypothetical or imagined,” said Lora Park, associate professor in the UB Department of Psychology and the study’s principal investigator.

“But in live interaction, men distanced themselves and were less attracted to a woman who outperformed them in intelligence.”

Previous research has shown that similarities between individuals can affect attraction. This new set of studies suggests that psychological distance — whether someone is construed as being near or far in relation to the self — plays a key role in determining attraction.

“It’s the distinction between the abstract and the immediate,” says Park. “There is a disconnect between what people appear to like in the abstract when someone is unknown and when that same person is with them in some immediate social context.”

Even though the research focus of the current study was on romantic attraction and, specifically, men’s interest in women, Park says the result might potentially be a broader phenomenon, extending to other interpersonal situations.

“That’s a question for future research,” she said. “But presumably, anyone who is outperformed by someone close to them might feel threatened themselves.

“We just happened to look at men in a romantic dating context.”

Park’s team conducted six separate studies involving 650 young adult subjects. The studies ranged from presenting subjects with hypothetical women, to women they expected to meet, to actually engaging in an interpersonal interaction.

“In each case, how much you like someone or how much you are attracted to them is affected by how intelligent that person is relative to you and how close that person is relative to you,” said Park.

But the area of performance has to be something important to the individual.

“The domain matters,” says Park. “If you don’t care about the domain, you might not be threatened. Yet, if you care a lot about the domain, then you might prefer that quality in somebody who is distant, then feel threatened when that person gets close to you.”

Ten Secrets to a Long and Happy Marriage

Newswise, September 10, 2015 – While all too many marriages end in divorce, many couples achieve long and happy unions.

Based on what he has learned during 35 years in the field, Loyola University Health System psychologist Michael Hakimi, PsyD, offers these 10 tips for achieving a successful marriage:

Love your spouse unconditionally. Be generous in expressing your love, even when there is an issue. Always remember what attracted you to each other in the first place, and keep these feelings alive. In words and actions, make your spouse feel very special. Commit yourself 100 percent.

Communicate with kind words and compassion. Avoid harsh criticism and blaming. Never neglect to say “Thank you” and “I’m sorry.” Express gratitude and appreciation for any act of kindness, service or good will. Establish a relationship that is based on honesty and mutual respect.

Place the interests and welfare of your spouse above those of your own.

Be faithful to your spouse, and make love as often as you both are in the mood.

Provide for the needs of your spouse to the best of your ability.

Listen carefully and try to understand what your spouse is saying.

Take your spouse’s opinion into consideration before making any important decision.

Work to overcome the undesirable traits in your own personality and behavior.

Continually seek ways to become a better husband, wife or parent.

Follow the Golden Rule: Treat your spouse the way you want to be treated.

Dr. Hakimi is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.