The U. S. is in the midst of a "loneliness epidemic". For a lot of people, the feeling is even more noticeable during the holidays. In addition to the emotional impact of chronic loneliness, it has some dramatic health consequences: increased risk of heart disease and stroke, infections, cancer, even death.
People may feel lonely when their social needs are not met by the people around them. Laetitia Mwilambwe-Tshilobo, a social cognitive neuroscientist at Princeton University, says loneliness epidemic captures two distinct groups: first, people with a low number of social connections; second, people who feel they have poor quality existing relationships.
Elisa Baek, a social neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, co-authored a study that looked at whether lonely people view the world differently than non-lonely people, specifically among college freshmen. Baek found that while non-lonely people were all similar in their neural responses, lonely people had responses that were really different-not just from the non-lonely group, but also from each other. Baek says that these idiosyncrasies （特性） in how lonely participants process the world, "may pose challenges in how these people are able to achieve social connection and feel connected with others. "
To study these changes to the brain, Baek's team collected fMRI data-a measure of blood flow changes in the brain-while first-year college students watched short videos to measure how similarly participants' brains responded to the videos. The videos ranged from dramatic and comedic clips to instructional demonstrations in order to reproduce experiences participants might have in daily life. She says it's the closest they could get to study people's brain activity-and how they process the world-while they were going about their lives.
Mwilambwe-Tshilobo, who is not involved in the study, says the research accurately highlights how individual differences affect people in experiencing loneliness. "Trying to connect more deeply with one or two or three other people may be more important than to try to get to know everybody and being on good terms with everybody. It doesn't have to be someone who is like-minded. It's more like: How can we get on the same page with people who we might not start off on the same page with, but that might form deeper connections afterwards?" she adds.
