Author's Blog

I am often askedwhat can be done to escape the grips of chronic loneliness.  In our book, we suggest foursimple steps, captured in the acronym EASE, for dealing with chronic loneliness.  Be forewarned:  Some of what follows may seem obvious, but keepin mind it is obvious that “birds of a feather flock together” and that “oppositesattract;” and we all “know” that “two heads are better than one” and that “too manycooks spoil the broth.” Although both statements in each of these pairs may be self-evident,they are internally inconsistent and therefore both cannot be true.  This is what is so problematic about self-evidenttruths about the mind – we have a variety of ready-made labels for things afterthe fact, but these labels often do not predict or explain anything about howthe mind actually works.  The real test iswhether these work for you when you are resolve to give EAST an honest try.

E is for Extend Yourself.  The withdrawal and passivity associated withloneliness are motivated by the perception of being threatened. To be able totest other ways of behaving without that feeling of danger, you need a safeplace to experiment, and you need to start small. Don’t focus on trying to findthe love of your life or to reinvent yourself all at once. Just slip a toe inthe water. Play with the idea of trying to get small doses of the positivesensations that come from positive social interactions.

To improve your odds of eliciting a positivereaction—and to reduce your odds of being disappointed—you may want to confineyour experimental outreach to the somewhat safer confines of charitableactivities. Volunteer at a shelter or a hospice, teach elders how to usecomputers, tutor children, read to the blind, or help with a kids’ sports team.You will not necessarily receive gratitude and praise for your gooddeeds—that’s not what you’re after—but it is also unlikely that you will receivescathing social punishment. There will be no big scene of fulfillment in whichyou are at long last voted football captain or prom queen, nor will youimmediately fall into a relationship with a movie star. But you may begin tofeel the positive sensations that can reinforce your desire to change, whilebuilding your confidence, while improving your ability to self-regulate. Even“small talk” about sports or the weather, when it is welcomed and shared, canbe a co-regulating, calming device, and the positive change it can bring to ourbody chemistry can help us get beyond the fearful outlook that holds us back.

A is for Action Plan.  Some people view themselves as adrift on agenetic and environmental raft over whose course they have no control. The simplerealizations that we are not passive victims, that we do have some control, andthat we can change our situation by changing our thoughts, expectations, andbehaviors toward others can have a surprisingly empowering effect, especiallyon our conscious effort to self-regulate. A second inkling of control comesfrom recognizing that we have latitude in choosing where to invest our socialenergy. It does not take an enormous change to alter one’s course anddestination dramatically.

Charitable activities enable us to put ourselves inthe social picture with less fear of rejection or abuse, but even here somediscretion is in order. Coaching kids’ soccer requires a least a littleknowledge of the game, but being manager or assistant coach often requires nothingmore than a willingness to show up and pass around the Gatorade and the orangeslices. Trying out for the community theater production could be awkward unlessyou really have acting or singing talent, but the theater group would probablywelcome you with open arms if you volunteered to help backstage or in theticket office. If you’re shy with people but love animals, volunteer at ananimal shelter. The animals will welcome you immediately. When you feel readyto reach out more to the humans around you, you can safely assume that theother volunteers share your interest in animal welfare, which gives you anatural basis for conversation, perhaps even connection.

Feeling lonely also make us fall victim to our owneagerness to please. Social connection does not involve superhuman strength.Committing to doing too many things for too many people in an effort to openourselves to connection can instead make us feel overworked, stressed out, andfaltering. The whole point is to be merely human—available to the commonbond of humanity. Nor does anyone say that you have to become a long-sufferingsaint. Instead, the most adaptive model is an openness to engagement combinedwith realistic expectations, accurate perception of social cues—including cuesthat suggest caution—and realism about the type and number of commitments totake on. That may sound like a lot to manage, but when our executive brain isnot distressed by feelings of isolation and threat, it is up to the task.

S is for Selection.  The solution to loneliness is not quantitybut quality of relationships. Human connections have to be meaningful andsatisfying for each of the people involved, and not according to some externalmeasure. Moreover, relationships are necessarily mutual and require fairlysimilar levels of intimacy and intensity on both sides. Even casual chitchatneeds to proceed at a pace that is comfortable for everyone. Coming on toostrong, oblivious to the other person’s response, is the quickest way to pushsomeone away. So part of selection issensing which prospective relationships are promising, and which would beclimbing the wrong tree. Loneliness makes us very attentive to social signals.The trick is to be sufficiently calm and “in the moment” to interpret thosesignals accurately.

In the same fashion,we all need to learn that beingdrawn to someone’s physical appearance or status is not a good basis for a deepconnection. Compatibility and sustainability depend far more on such things ascommon beliefs, attitudes, interests, and activities. When it comes to datingand marital success, the data show that similarity(“birds of a feather flock together”) trumps complementarity (“oppositesattract”).

Deciding how to search for birds of your own featherrequires selection as well. For those who tend to be more quiet than talkative,finding someone who is also comfortable with silent companionship may be a goodidea. Enthusiastic readers, especially shy readers, are more likely to findpeople to connect with at an author’s appearance at a bookstore, or by workingin a literacy program, than by going to a dance club. How you should go abouttrying to meet people depends on what kind of people you want to meet.

E is for Expect the Best.  Social contentment can help us to be moreconsistent, generous, and resilient. It can make us more optimistic, and that“expect the best” attitude helps us project the best. Warmth and goodwill onone person’s part is more likely to elicit warmth and goodwill from otherpeople–such is the power of reciprocity. With practice, any of us one can “warmup” what we present to the world. We have more control over our thoughts andbehavior patterns than we may think, but then again, no one can exercise totalcontrol of interpersonal relationships, any more than we can force an immediateand complete turnaround in the way others see us. While we wait for the changein us to register in the world around us, fear and frustration can push us backinto the critical and demanding behavior associated with loneliness. This iswhen patiently focusing on the small physiochemical rewards of reaching out tofeed others can help keep us on track.

The need for patience does not end once we begin tofind greater happiness in our relationships. Even if any of us were perfect,inevitably the other people we come to know will have different perspectives.The prototypical wedding vows, “for better or for worse, in good times and inbad,” are a public proclamation of the ever-present likelihood of interpersonalfriction. Even the best friends and the partners in the best marriages willdisagree and hurt each other from time to time. The secret to success in theface of this reality is not to magnify the moments of friction by over-interpretingthem.

John

I’ve been asked to speak about loneliness and social connection at a Unitarian church near where I live, so I attended a service last Sunday to, essentially, “case the joint.” I was struck by the degree to which their philosophy of multiple wisdom traditions aligns with some of the implications of social neuroscience, especially in the context of loneliness. In Unitarian terms, John’s research has added a new "wisdom tradition" to the mix, and that tradition is psychology which shows how the social world gets under our skin, and how what’s going on under our skin affects the social world around us. In effect, this research provides hard-science validation for what many ancient traditions have said all along about the life enhancing benefits of altruism, community, and seeking a good that is higher than self.

The service I attended took place at the autumnal equinox, and the congregation read this poem by Robert T. Weston. It may not be great literature, but I thought the message was a good one to keep in mind:

Autumn, we know, is life en route to death. The asters are but harbingers of frost. The trees, flaunting their colors at the sky, in other times will follow where the leaves have fallen. And so shall we. Yet other lives will come. So may we know, accept, embrace the mystery of life we hold a while. Nor mourn that it outgrows each separate self, but still rejoice that we may have our day. Lift high our colors to the sky! And give in our time, fresh glory to the earth.

Bill

I was out at the edge of the swamp last evening when the sultriness almost knocked me over.  I thought, ‘I know where this came from.’  Hot and heavy air from the Gulf Coast had literally blown all the way up to New England to find me. 

I grew up between Houston and Galveston and left that hot and humid place the first chance I got.  Reading about survivors of the storm wading through salt water and sewage thick with mosquitoes and water moccasins reminded me of my own experiences riding out hurricanes as a kid.  I don’t do heat very well, or rising water, or poisonous snakes. 

But while the images in the newspaper increased my concern for friends and relatives still living down near the Gulf, the sensations in the air filled me with nostalgia.  At the beach in New England, we bask on the sand hoping to store enough heat to see us through a quick dip.  At Galveston, we would spend the whole day in surf the temperature of bathwater because the sand was too hot to walk on.  I remember as a kid the seemingly interminable causeway across the bay, the blinding glare of the sky when we got on the island, and then that first glimpse of the ocean, followed by the overpowering smell of heat hitting salt water, and suntan lotion on cheap rubber flotation devices. 

Galveston was for me a place of wonderfully mysterious textures.  There were grand old houses from the Victorian era when the city rivaled New Orleans, the seedy Pleasure Pier with its shops selling seashells and other tourist junk, and along the beach, a fortress from the Spanish American war.  On the flat and empty two-lane blacktop where I lived, there was nothing but ditches and weeds and heat that literally melted the asphalt.   

Ironically, decades after I moved north to pursue “the life of the mind,” I now live on a two lane black top with ditches and, actually, a fair number of weeds.  As a kid, I used to ride up and down our road on my bicycle talking to myself.  I also spent a considerable amount of time walking along the ditches with my wagon, picking up bottles for what was then the 2-cent deposit.  I laugh when I find myself out doing the same thing now, only now the motivation isn’t pocket money.  I own five acres and a 17^th century house along this swamp road, and as Wallace Stevens might have pointed out, it doesn’t look good to have junk in the weeds.  I think about how profoundly lonely I was as a kid, in the heat, with no one to talk to, and no one else who seemed interest in textures, and history, and old fortresses along the beach.  Today, as a writer, I’m just as physically isolated most days as I was as a kid.  But now I belong to so many communities that I care deeply about—including the physical community of the little town in which I live—that I can enjoy the luxury of solitude without the debilitating pain of loneliness. 

My heart goes out to any kids down on the Gulf today trying to find someone to play with. 

  Bill

What is social neuroscience?

We like to think of ourselves as mythic individualists but humans are fundamentally a social species. As
a social species, we create emergent organizations beyond the
individual - structures that range from dyads, families, and groups to
cities, civilizations, and cultures. These emergent structures evolved
hand in hand with neural and hormonal mechanisms to support them
because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive,
reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too
survived to reproduce.Social neuroscience represents an
interdisciplinary approach devoted to understanding how biological
systems implement social processes and behavior and to using biological
concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social processes
and behavior.

Tell us about the research you conducted for your book, Loneliness.

To examine the role of the social world on neural, hormonal, and genetic
mechanisms, we have compared the differences between individuals who
are or feel socially isolated from those who do not. A wide variety of
differences have been documented in socially isolated versus socially
housed animals, including decreased lifespan in the Drosophilia
melanogaster (fruit fly) to obesity and Type 2 diabetes in mice. Human
studies have similarly found social isolation to be associated with
higher rates of morbidity and mortality. Research on loneliness
includes brain imaging, autonomic and neuroendocrine assays, gene
transcript analyses, twin studies, sleep studies, and various
psychological and behavioral analyses. We have drawn upon a large
number of cross-sectional studies of lonely young and older adults,
various experimental studies in which we manipulate loneliness,
longitudinal studies of twins and their families, and longitudinal
studies of middle-aged and older adults in Chicago. As we discuss in
our book, one of the surprising early findings was that experimentally
manipulating loneliness produced changes in a wide variety of other
psychological and behavioral states, including self-esteem, depressive
mood, anxiety, hostility, shyness, and social skills, that were as
dramatic as those we observed in cross sectional studies. Our
longitudinal studies have confirmed that loneliness appears to cause a
wide variety of potentially deleterious effects on neural, hormonal,
and genetic mechanisms as well as on health, cognition, and well being.

How does loneliness differ from physical isolation or solitude?

Physical isolation can contribute to feelings of loneliness, but people can be
lonely in a marriage, family, or crowd. Loneliness is the pain you feel
when your need for connection isn’t being met, and you can feel that
anywhere—even when surrounded by friends or family. What matters is how
you feel about it, your subjective response. The pain of being alone is
termed loneliness, whereas the bliss of being alone is termed solitude.
We and others have found that it is not the number of friends or
contact that predicts loneliness, it is the quality of those
relationships.

Can people be surrounded by family and friends and have a very active social life and still be lonely?

Yes, for instance, freshman when they arrive at college are sharing housing
and are surrounded by hundreds of other students, yet on average their
feelings of loneliness are heightened by the fact that they have
severed their normal ties with friends and family, in many instances
for the first time in their lives. Similarly, a bereaved spouse may
suffer the searing pain of loneliness despite the presence of more
supportive family and friends than typically are around them. But it
does not require a life changing event to find oneself lonely in the
midst of an active social life. The frenetic pace with which many in
contemporary society move from work to family obligations to social
activities can leave one feeling at a loss for any meaningful human
contact. About a quarter century ago, when Americans in a national
survey were asked the number of confidants they had, the most frequent
response was three. This question was asked again a few years ago, and
the most frequent response was zero. This observation is consistent
with the robust finding that it is the quality of our social
relationships, not the quantity, which is an essential part of what it
takes for us to be healthy and happy.

How has the science of loneliness changed in recent years?

The science tended previously to characterize loneliness as an aversive
state with no redeeming features, and as a state barely different from
general negativity or depressed mood. More recent research suggests a
very different depiction of loneliness. We have adopted the perspective
of loneliness as a biological construct, a state that has evolved as a
signal to change behavior – very much like hunger, thirst, or physical
pain – that serves to help one avoid damage and promote the
transmission of genes to the gene pool. In the case of loneliness, the
signal is a prompt to renew the connections we need to survive and
prosper.

Do you think that American culture influences people to devalue human connection and community?

Our culture stands on both sides of this continuum. We espouse that “united
we stand, divided we fall,” and we celebrate the achievements of the
solitary individual. Humans are fundamentally social creatures,
however, and our strength and considerable capacity as a species comes
from our collective connectedness, not our individual might.

What role did loneliness play from an evolutionary perspective?

Research using behavioral analyses, brain scans, physiological markers, and
heritability analyses has allowed us to put loneliness into an
evolutionary context that underscores its utility. Early in our history
as a species, we survived and prospered only by banding together—in
couples, in families, in tribes—to provide mutual protection and
assistance. Loneliness evolved like any other form of pain. As noted
above, this was a prompt to renew the connections we needed to insure
survival and to promote social trust, cohesiveness, and collective
action. Hunger, if ignored, can be followed by ravaging effects on the
brain and biology, ultimately reducing a person’s ability in the wild
to find and capture food. Loneliness, too, if ignored can have damaging
effects that make it more difficult for an individual to escape its
grips. Moreover, when offspring have long periods of abject dependency,
simply surviving to reproduce is not sufficient to ensure one’s genes
make it into the gene pool. Thus, loneliness as a prompt to reconnect
with others, well as for our offspring to survive long enough such that
they, too, reproduced.

Is there a genetic variation among individuals in their need for social connection?

Yes, loneliness is about 50% heritable, but this does not mean loneliness is
determined by genes. An equal amount is due to situational factors.
What appears to be heritable is the intensity of pain felt when one
feels socially isolated. Being sensitive or insensitive are each fine,
but what is important is to create a social environment that matches
one’s predisposition toward feeling social pain. If one is especially
sensitive, then it may benefit one’s health and well being to
prioritize the development and maintenance of a few high quality
relationships.

Many social scientist and psychologist compare
the human brain to an intricate, solitary computer and to humans as
being driven primarily by ruthless competition and narrow
self-interest. Does your research support this theory?

The dominant metaphor for the scientific study of the human mind during the
latter half of the 20th century has been the computer – a solitary
device with massive information processing capacities. Our studies of
loneliness left us unsatisfied with this metaphor. Computers today are
massively interconnected devices with capacities that extend far beyond
the resident hardware and software of a solitary computer. It became
apparent to us that the telereceptors (e.g., eyes, ears) of the human
brain have provided wireless broadband interconnectivity to humans for
millennia. Just as computers have capacities and processes that are
transduced through but extend far beyond the hardware of a single
computer, the human brain has evolved to promote social and cultural
capacities and processes that are transduced through but that extend
far beyond a solitary brain. To understand the full capacity of humans,
one needs to appreciate not only the memory and computational power of
the brain but its capacity for representing, understanding, and
connecting with other individuals. That is, one needs to recognize that
we have evolved a powerful, meaning making social brain. This social
brain is not always a benevolent brain, however. Our research certainly
says humans have the capacity to be driven by ruthless competition and
narrow self-interests, but it also shows that we have an additional,
wondrous capacity to cooperate, care about others as well as oneself,
and compete in fair and mutually beneficial ways. As a society, it may
be important to find ways to promote the latter over the former in
individuals.

You argue that loneliness can have serious physiological consequences. Could you please share your research on this issue?

As we discuss our book, our findings include

• Increased vascular resistance, or resistance to blood flow throughout the body
• Elevated blood pressure as one ages
• Increased rises in the stress hormone, cortisol, in the morning and heightened hypothalamic pituitary adrenocortical activity
•
Under-expression of genes bearing anti-inflammatory glucocorticoid
response elements (GREs) and over-expression of genes bearing response
elements for pro-inflammatory NF-κB/Rel transcription factors – that
is, altered gene expressions in immune cells
• Less efficient sleep
• Higher levels of depressive symptoms and lower life satisfaction
• Poorer executive function
• Poorer health behaviors such as exercise
•
Brain circuitry indicative of less rewarding in response to pleasant
social stimuli, and more attention and less perspective taking in
response to unpleasant social stimuli

In addition, we review evidence that loneliness is associated with:

• Progression of Alzheimer’s Disease
• Obesity
• Diminished immunity
• Reduction in independent living
• Alcoholism
• Suicidal ideation and behavior, and
• Poorer health

In short, loneliness can contribute to poor health.

How does chronic loneliness impact our cognitive functioning and ability to self-regulate?

Loneliness impairs our ability to self-regulate and compromises our executive
functioning. It interferes with judgment, complex thought, will power,
and perseverance as well as one’s ability to read other people.

What causes some people to get stuck in “chronic” loneliness?

Because loss of social connection was such a threat in evolutionary terms,
loneliness has evolved to engender fear as well as dread and pain. For
each of us, our need for social connection and our sensitivity to
social pain is biased by our individual genetic inheritance.
Threat-based responses, understandably, prompt us to look out for
ourselves, which can interfere with the accurate perceptions we need to
effectively connect with others and the selection of the social skills
or appropriate social responses in any given occasion. Thus, when a
person becomes lonely, they can get caught in a feedback loop in which
the undercurrent of danger and threat associated in evolutionary terms
with social isolation can promote a form of social cognition and
interaction that becomes a self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling prophecy.

Could you share with us some of the solutions for the
individual and society to decrease loneliness and to increase
connection and social cooperation?

We go into this in some depth
in the book but, briefly, our individual, sometimes distorted perceptions
contribute to the physiological and chemical effects that accompany
loneliness, and thus we can make significant change, even at the
physiological level, through techniques based on cognitive therapy,
which consists largely of reframing one’s thoughts. Mostly, the
solution lies in getting beyond the fear in order to be more available
to others, which then provides the positive, almost therapeutic
physiological responses that our bodies are more than willing to
provide through normal social connection. A second key ingredient is to
select carefully those with whom one seeks to develop a relationship.
People need not be liked by or connected to everyone, again it is not
the quantity but the quality of one’s relationships that matter most.
And the research is clear that similarity – similar attitudes, values,
interests, and activities – are an important foundation upon which to
build such relationships.

John Cacioppo & William Patrick

A reader recently emailed and asked about the odds we described in our book of one being able to predict the loneliness of one member of a twin based on knowledge of the other's level of loneliness.  You may also have wondered how we got these probabilities. 

The statistics involved in determining heritability are considerably more complex than joint probability analyses, but joint probability statistics is sufficient to give you a sense of what was involved in heritability analyses.  If you lined up the several thousand pairs of identical twins we studied in two lines, individual A from a twin in one line (let's call it line-A) and individual B from this twin in a second line (line B), and if you assumed that people are either lonely or not at a probability of 50-50 (this is an oversimplification but not one that changes the point), and if you tried to predict the level of loneliness (lonely, not lonely) of any single individual in line-A or line-B, then (by definition of this example) you would have a 50-50 chance (that is, a 0.5 probability) of accurately predicting this person’s loneliness. 

Now suppose I told you the level of loneliness of individual A from a twin, and I asked you to use this information to predict the loneliness (lonely, not lonely) of individual A’s twin in line-B.  If loneliness were entirely genetically determined, then you would be able to perfectly predict the loneliness of individual B based on knowledge of the level of loneliness of the twin in line A as long as they were identical twins.  If one went through the entire line-A, person after person, you would still be perfectly able to predict the loneliness of the identical twin in line-B based on knowledge of the loneliness of the twin in line-A. 

The joint probability is the probability that you could accurately predict the entire series.  If you flip a fair coin, you have a 50-50 chance of getting a head or a tail.  If you flip the coin three times, the probability of getting a head or a tail is 50-50 each time you flip the coin.  However, the odds of getting a particular series – such as three heads in a row, or a head then a tail then and a head – is 0.5*0.5*0.5 or 0.125.  The formula for a joint probability is p**k (p to the k-th power), where p is the probability (0.5 in this example) and k is the number in the series you are trying to predict (3 in this example).

In our example, you know the loneliness of each individual in line-A – a particular series of “lonely” and “not lonely” individuals – and you are trying to predict the loneliness of each corresponding twin in line-B.  The likelihood you will be able to predict this particular series by chance is the joint probability.  In the case of identical twins (100% shared genes) and complete genetic determinism, the probability of predicting one member of a twin’s loneliness is 1.0, so the joint probability is 1.0**k, where k is the number of pairs of identical twins in our example.  As you can see, the joint probability in this example is 1.0, meaning you would be able to predict perfectly the specific series of levels of loneliness of the individuals in line-B based on the levels of loneliness of their twin in line-A. 

This might seem nonobvious because the assumption is so unrealistic – loneliness is not by any means completely genetically determined.  Substitute “gender” for “level of loneliness,” though, and perhaps the math will be more intuitive.  The example using loneliness thus far is only intended to illustrate what would one would expect in terms of probabilities if loneliness were completely genetically determined.

Let’s now examine the opposite extreme as a starting assumption.  What would be expected if there was no heritability (and no shared environment as in separated at birth)?  You would still have a 50-50 chance of predicting any individual A’s or any individual B's level of loneliness based on chance – we haven’t changed that simplifying assumption.  If you knew a particular individual A’s level of loneliness and there was no heritability (or shared environmental contribution) then you would only have a 50-50 chance of accurately predicting the identical twin in line-B level of loneliness.  That is, knowing individual A’s level of loneliness would not help you predict the level of loneliness in the identical twin.  Furthermore, if you looked at the likelihood of predicting the series of loneliness in the individuals in line-B based on the loneliness of their paired twin in line A, the probability of successfully producing an accurate series would be 0.5**k, where k would be the number of twin pairs.  Even when k is still fairly small, say 10, 0.5**k is very close to zero (0.5**10 < 0.001).  When k is in the thousands, the odds of correctly predicting the series in line-B based on knowledge of the series in line-A is effectively nil.

Partial heritability permits better than chance but worse than perfect prediction of the series of loneliness in the individuals B based on the loneliness of their paired twin in line A.  The actual statistics for determining loneliness are considerably more complex, but this example gives you an idea of how well one can predict the level of some variable in a series of twins based on that variable in the other twin depends in part on the heritability of of this variable.  Perhaps this gives you some sense for how one might think about determining the heritability of something like loneliness based on twin studies.

John