An American study published in the journal Psychological Science shows that people who suffer from loneliness do not see the world in the same way as people who do not feel lonely.
In terms of information processing, non-lonely individuals are all the same, but each person processes the world in their own way.
How was the research conducted?
The University of California study performed neuroimaging tests on 66 young men between the ages of 18 and 21. Students were asked to complete the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a self-assessment that measures their feelings of loneliness and social isolation. .
Based on the results, young people were divided into two groups – lonely and “non-lonely” (those who do not suffer from loneliness). Next, the students were forced to watch 14 videos while researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity.
The content is so engaging that participants’ mind wandering during the task will not affect the data collected. The topics of the videos ranged from emotional music videos to festival scenes and sporting events and provided a variety of scenarios for analysis
Psychologist Elisa Pike, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, and her team analyzed 214 different brain regions and how they responded to stimuli in the videos over time.
They 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 brain function and information processing in isolated animals compared to their non-isolated peers. Additionally, the researchers found not only differences between the two groups, but also significant differences between isolated individuals.
The researchers tested whether there was a correlation between loneliness and neural responses to normal stimuli, and whether they followed what the paper calls the “Anna Karenina principle.” It was inspired by the opening line of the novel by Russian writer and philosopher Leo Tolstoy: I am Karenina “Happy families are all the same; Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
“It’s surprising that lonely people were less of the same,” Pike said in a statement. He added, “The Anna Karenina principle” is an apt description for people who feel lonely because they feel lonely in a certain way, not the generally assumed way. ”
The study found that while atypical people were more or less similar neurologically, individuals with high levels of loneliness were more likely to exhibit unique brain responses regardless of how many friends they had.
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