News & Publications About Loneliness

By Newswise

"Despite the fact most of us have cell phones, Internet access and other communication devices, many still deal with loneliness on a daily basis. For some, emotional distress can lead to overeating and serious weight gain.

Mary Jo Rapini, a psychotherapist with The Methodist Weight Management Center in Houston, says people tend to head to the pantry when they are lonely because it brings them comfort. Some will begin to gain a lot of weight, begin to feel even more self conscious about their appearance, and fall into a deeper depression.

Rapini adds that it’s important to get your feelings out when you are depressed. If you have no one to talk to, you can express yourself by journaling, drawing self-portraits of how you are feeling or writing poetry or short stories about your situation."

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BY SUNIL | HEATH CARE DIET

"Lonely people are more prone to developing high blood pressure in later life, says a study.

Researchers found that chronic feelings of loneliness push up blood pressure over time, causing a marked increase after four years in people aged over 50, reported dailymail.co.uk

The new study is the first to show a direct link between loneliness and high blood pressure, known as hypertension, which raises the risk of heart attack and stroke.

US researchers considered whether depression and stress were pushing up blood pressure but found they were only partly responsible.

“Loneliness behaves as though it is a unique health-risk factor in its own right,” said Louise Hawkley, who is the member of the research team from Chicago University.

“Living alone did not necessarily mean people were lonely. Some people appeared to have busy lives and a good social network but still felt lonely, which puts them at risk,” she added.

The latest research involved 229 people aged 50 to 68 who were part of a long-term study on aging. Members of the group were asked a series of questions to determine if they perceived themselves as lonely.

During the five-year study, Hawkley found a clear connection between feelings of loneliness reported at the beginning of the study and rising blood pressure over that period.

“The increase associated with loneliness wasn’t observable until two years into the study, but then continued to increase until four years later,” she said.

Even people with modest levels of loneliness were affected, says a report in the journal Psychology and Aging.

Among all the people in the sample, the loneliest people saw their blood pressure go up by 14.4 mm more than the blood pressure of their most socially contented counterparts over the four-year study period.

Hawkley said that people who have many friends and a social network can feel lonely if they find their relationships unsatisfying. Conversely, people who live rather solitary lives may not be lonely if their few relationships are meaningful and rewarding.

“Loneliness is characterized by a motivational impulse to connect with others but also a fear of negative evaluation, rejection and disappointment.

“We hypothesise that threats to one’s sense of safety and security with others are toxic components of loneliness, and that hyper-vigilance for social threat may contribute to alterations in physiological functioning, including elevated blood pressure,” she said."

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By Per Koch | Pandia

"Google and Facebook make a mess of things, putting private information out in the open. This may ultimately undermine people’s trust in search and social media.

Back in the 80’s I was drafted to the Norwegian Navy and served as a Petty Officer in cryptography and communication. This was before the age of the World Wide Web and email. The main forms of military communication was VHF radio and telex!

As is the case now, information was given different classifications, from Unclassified at the one end via Restricted, Confidential and Secret to Top Secret at the other. To see a Top Secret documents you need Top Secret clearance, but even that is not enough. There is also the Need to Know principle, in essence saying that if you have no use for the information you should not be given access to it.

The reason for this is the following truth: Intelligence is more than the individual snippets of information. It is more than the sum of all the data that is available. It is about putting all these pieces of information together and turning them into a coherent narrative. This is not about the the pieces, but the complete jigsaw picture.

This means that even Unclassified information — which in isolation may pose no threat — may help the enemy gain useful information about your total defensive capability.

To give one example: An unclassified food shopping list for a Naval base can be used to ascertain the number of soldiers living there.

The web helps you merge information

The growth of the Internet, the search engines and the social web has made this insight important for all of us.

The party photo you put up on Flickr may not say much about you in itself, but if you compare the time stamp of that photo with your work calendar, it may tell your employer a lot. This was the day you called in sick. And there you are, smiling in front of the camera, with a glass of champagne in your hand.

It is so much easier to work as a private investigator these days. If you know your basic web search techniques, you can get a lot of info about a person without leaving your office.

You can play private detective yourself. Go over to Spokeo and search for a name. Spokeo will do its best to amalgamate data from various online sources.

The reason both Facebook and Google are in such pain right now is this: They believe people’s willingness to share data using various services and technologies means that they have become less worried about privacy.

This may be the case for some, but if a sufficient number of internet savvy users get worried, that worry may spread to the rest of society.

Google Buzz

Google’s clumsy launch of Google Buzz is an excellent example of this.

In order to speed up the establishment of a new social web site, Google decided to make all users of Gmail members of Google Buzz. Then they the Gmail contacts you were most often in contact with your “friends” in that network, and made your list of friends public.

An human rights activist in a totalitarian country risked having all his secret contacts displayed for all the world to see. And yes, the Chinese and Iranian secret services know how to use Google Buzz.

Facebook

Facebook is now undermining people’s trust in its willingness to keep your private information private, by making its privacy policy and its privacy settings non-transparent.

Most users probably believe that what they do on Facebook is only shared with their friends. That depends on their privacy settings, and it is getting harder and harder to understand what these settings are for each one of us.

For instance: Facebook recently launched an “I like this web page” recommendation button that, without asking Facebook users first, automatically share some of their profile information with Pandora, Yelp, Microsoft and other companies.

Facebook has also started requiring users to join public groups based on the previously private “interests” listed on their profiles.

The Facebook opt-out is complex

The New York Times puts it this way:

“The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options. “

I must admit I am seriously considering closing down my Facebook account, but hey, that is close to impossible. You see, Facebook will not delete your data, only hide it. (Although there is one carefully hidden link that may help you achieve that goal).

Google Street View and WiFi

The need for privacy goes beyond the social web.

Google has for a long time had cars driving around in cities taking photos of streets and buildings. They use these photos for Street View part of the Google Map service. Search for an address, and you can see how that street looked the last time Google was there.

Originally Google published the photos as they were. They have since agreed to blur faces and number plates.

What Google did not tell the public, however, was that these cars also map all the WiFi transmitters in the neighbourhood, including yours.

Google was using this info for helping mobile phones determine their exact location — in case the GPS system is failing or missing.

However, Google has apparently also been picking up random data transmitted via these networks.

About 600 gigabytes of data was taken off open (but not password protected) WiFi networks in more than 30 countries. Google says this was a technical mistake and that it plans to delete it all.

The WiFi scandal has caused an uproar in Germany, which sees it all as a threat to public privacy. The Germans are very sensitive about these issues. They have learned the hard way what a police state can do to a people.

Public information

Google’s excuse for tracking WiFi networks was that the WiFi network name router number is public information. If you set up a WiFi network, you must know that it will broadcast its presence to everybody in the neighbourhood. Moreover, other companies have already done something similar.

Google is missing the point. There is a huge leap from putting out your garbage can, to having someone go through it in search for your bank account number.

In this case Google’s mapping of WiFi hot spots may be considered useful and legitimate (although the storage of data transmitted is not), but the fact that Google didn’t think about the privacy implications is scary. If companies like Google and Facebook continue making this kind of mistakes, they risk undermining people’s trust in such services.

If that trust disappears, people will ultimately leave Facebook for more secure alternatives. People will stop using Gmail and other Google services. That would be a shame, because they have become useful tools in our daily lives.

Google’s attempts at rebuilding trust

The main reason for Google leaving China was most likely that having Chines hackers going into Gmail accounts would kill the trust users have in Google. But leaving China does not help if Google itself is not able to think through its own actions.

Google has already started encrypting Gmail messages. Next week it will launch an encrypted version of Google search. I guess my old Navy bosses would approve.

Moreover, yesterday the Google Blog announced that Google will stop their Street View cars collecting WiFi network data entirely.

Google is clearly getting the message. The Google Blog says:

“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust—and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.”

Facebook does not get it

Ethan Beard, director of Facebook’s developer network does not get it, though. He says that “the response from users speaks very, very loudly that they love what we’re doing.”

He argues that Facebook users don’t use the site to store a bunch of private information they don’t want others to see:

“The reason that people use Facebook is to share information with their friends and to connect with things that are important to them.”

Fine, but what happens when they find out that they are sharing a lot of these information with total strangers?"

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By Sophia Dembling | Psychology Today

"Research out of the University of Chicago finds that loneliness can raise blood pressure in people over 50, which is interesting.
But equally interesting: the researchers were clear that the loneliness has nothing to do with the number of friends a person has. The measure used to detect loneliness, called the UCLA Loneliness Scale, isn't about number. People didn't rate themselves according to whether they live by the credos "the more the merrier" or "I never met a stranger." Ratings were more along the lines of, "How often do you feel you cannot tolerate being so alone" and "How often do you find yourself waiting for people to call or write?"

So, like we've been saying, loneliness isn't just about being alone; it's how we feel about being alone.

We probably all know what it's like to feel lonely surrounded by people at a party. And to feel fulfilled in an empty house. And we agree that quality trumps quantity in our friendships. Nice to have it validated by the professionals, though. People with just a few friends are not sad and lonely. As long as our friendships--however many or few--are close and meaningful, we're good.

The word "friend" is tossed around too freely these days, anyway. I prefer to distinguish among friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Also between real-world friends and Facebook "friends."

What is a true friend? We probably all have our own definitions. For me, it's someone I don't feel alone with. Who doesn't bore me. To whom I feel comfortable turning when I need to be talked off the ledge, and for whom I am glad (even honored) to return the favor.

I will say all those things about only a few people in my life. And then there is a second tier of friends. I like and care about them, consider them friends, but they are not privy to my deepest thoughts.

"Dunbar's number," proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar in 1992, is a commonly used assessment of the number of relationships we are cognitively capable of keeping straight; that number is 150. I probably have a network of that many people in my life. I certainly wouldn't call them all friends, though.

In fact, I'm an avid Facebook user but I'm starting to feel like I have too many "friends" even there. I'm not terribly far above the number at which people might judge me desperate. Research reveals that the ideal number of Facebook "friends" is 302. That's enough so you don't seem pathetic, not so many that you seem needy. But I have accepted "friend" requests from people with whom I feel no particular connection. In some cases, these strangers have become virtual friends. Some have even become real friends.That's cool. But others have just remained little faces in a box. We have nothing to say to each other. And having lots of "friends" doesn't make me feel better about myself. It makes me feel kind of...phony.

Besides, no matter how many "friends" we have, we actually interact with only a handful of them, according to Cameron Marlow, Facebook's "in-house sociologist." If you are a woman with 500 friends, you might post comments on the pages of about 26 and actually communicate with about 16. (For men, 17 and ten.) I've never done the math on my "friends," but that sounds about right. Those "friends" are the keepers. And maybe a few people I just find generally interesting.

The rest? Perfectly nice people, I'm sure, but I'm considering relegating them to LinkedIn, among my colleagues and acquaintances."

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By IB Times

"Lonely children and teenagers disclose more personal and intimate information on the internet than those who are not lonely, a Queensland University of Technology (QUT) study has found.

The study, based on a survey of 626 Brisbane primary and secondary school students, found those who were lonely communicated more frequently online, disclosed more intimate information and were more likely to have contact with adults on the internet.

The study of students aged 10-16, by QUT masters student Luigi Bonetti, Associate Professor Marilyn Campbell and Dr Linda Gilmore, found lonely students compensated for their weaker social skills by using the internet to meet people.

"We discovered that kids, who did identify as socially anxious or lonely, found the internet to be a very positive experience," Associate Professor Campbell said.

The survey found lonely children and teenagers communicated online much more frequently about how they felt, serious problems and confidential topics.

Lonely children and teenagers also reported communicating online in order to belong to a group and to relax - much more so than those who were not lonely.

"Lonely kids found great company on the internet," Associate Professor Campbell said.

She said the study found lonely children and teenagers viewed the internet as a "protected" environment in which they could better express their inner selves.

"We also found that kids who were socially anxious felt they could be more themselves when communicating online," she said.

"They were not as anxious in developing friendships because they were at that one remove."

Associate Professor Campbell said it was not known if lonely young people would integrate these online social skills into their real lives.

"It is also not known whether online communication alleviates depressed feelings or simply isolates lonely users even more," she said. Further study was needed in this area.

The study's authors recommended parents and professionals should particularly monitor the internet use of lonely children and teenagers who could be at greater risk of becoming addicted to internet use.

The study also found they could also be more likely to go out of their way to meet in real life people with whom they had online relationships.

However, Associate Professor Campbell said parents' role in helping a child to use the internet safely could be compared with giving a child a bicycle.

"They have to educate them about the dangers but not go overboard," she said."

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