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A United States-based study, published in Psychological Science, suggests that people who are lonely don’t quite see the world the same way as those who aren’t lonely. Additionally, it also said that when it comes to processing information people who are not lonely are all alike, however, every lonely person processes the world in their own idiosyncratic way.
The University of California research conducted neuroimaging tests on 66 young adults in their first-year college aged between 18 and 21.
The students were also asked to complete the UCLA Loneliness Scale which is a self-report to measure their feelings of loneliness and social isolation.
Based on the results, the young adults were divided into two groups – lonely and “nonlonely” (people who do not experience loneliness). Subsequently, the students were made to watch 14 video clips while researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to view brain activity.
The content was said to have been engaging enough so that participants’ minds wandering during the task would not affect the data collected. The topic of the videos ranged from sentimental music videos to party scenes and sporting events, providing a range of scenarios for analysis.
Psychologist Elisa Baek, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, and her team analysed 214 different regions of the brain and how they responded over time to stimuli in the videos.
They also compared activity between individuals in each brain region to understand how similar or different their responses were.
What did the study find?
The researchers found significant differences in the way that lonely people’s brains work and process information when compared to their nonlonely peers. Additionally, the researchers not only discovered differences between the two groups but also found that significant differences existed between individual loners.
The researchers tested if there were associations between loneliness and neural responses to naturalistic stimuli and if they follow what the paper referred to as the “Anna Karenina principle.” It was inspired by the opening line of Russian writer and philosopher Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
“It was surprising to find that lonely people were even less similar to each other,” said Baek, in a statement. She added, “The ‘Anna Karenina principle’ is a fitting description of lonely people, as they experience loneliness in an idiosyncratic way, not in a universally relatable way.”
While nonlonely people were more or less similar, neurologically, individuals with high levels of loneliness regardless of how many friends they had were more likely to have unique brain responses, the study found.
The researchers also noted that being surrounded by people who see the world differently from us might also be a risk factor for loneliness despite daily social interactions with other people.