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
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