Brain Scans Hint That Lonely Individuals Process the World Differently
The brains of lonely individuals respond to video stimuli in unique ways dissimilar from their peers, while the brains of less lonely people respond similarly to others’, suggesting that lonely individuals may process the world differently, which could exacerbate or even trigger their loneliness. This finding was recently published in the journal Psychological Science.
Elisa Baek, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California-Dornsife, led the investigation when she was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA. She and her colleagues utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brains of college students as they watched a collection of 14 short videos during a 90-minute session. The videos included highlights from sporting events, clips from documentaries, and emotional depictions of human life, and 66 students participated. After undergoing the lengthy scans, they subsequently completed an extensive questionnaire intended to gauge how lonely they feel.
Baek and her co-authors then divided the students into “lonely” and “non-lonely” groups, determined by their scores from the survey. Students who had a loneliness score below the median were categorized as lonely, while those who scored above were considered non-lonely. The researchers then conducted a thorough statistical analysis in which each individual’s brain imaging results were compared to every other individual’s. They found that the more lonely a person was, the more distinct their brain imaging results were compared to those of the other volunteers.
“We found that non-lonely individuals were very similar to each other in their neural responses, whereas lonely individuals were remarkably dissimilar to each other and to their non-lonely peers,” the researchers summarized. The results held even when controlling for the number of friends each participant reported, reaffirming prior research showing that anyone can be lonely regardless of their social connections.
