PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPSLoneliness
You can be surrounded by people, but if you feel no connection with
any of them, loneliness will descend like a grey Sunday. A strangely
paradoxical finding that emerged in 2009 was that loneliness is
contagious. Paradoxical, because you’d think a loner would be the last
person to start a trend. But according to psychologist John Cacioppo
at the University of Chicago, loneliness, like happiness, spreads
through social networks like a virus. The researchers took advantage
of longitudinal data collected from thousands of people as part of
an investigation into the risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Part
of this research involved the participants answering questions about
depression and loneliness, and it so happened that many of them knew
each other. This enabled Cacioppo to make some curious observations,
such as the fact that a participant was 52 percent more likely to say
they were lonely if they had a friend who also described themselves as
lonely. Having a friend with a friend who felt lonely increased the risk
of loneliness by 25 percent. Even a lonely friend of a friend of a friend
boosted one’s own vulnerability to loneliness by fifteen percent! These
effects were additive – the more lonely people a participant knew, the
greater their own risk of feeling lonely.
Brain-imaging research shows that lonely people are more attuned
to negative stimuli and show a suppressed neural response to positive
scenes – almost as if they’re actively on the lookout for potential snubs
and slurs headed their way. Mixing with a friend like this is likely
to make you feel lonely, which in turn will affect how you mix with
other friends and so on. If all this talk of social isolation is leaving
you feeling, well, rather lonely, you might benefit from switching on
your favourite soap opera or sitcom. Another study published in 2009
by Jaye Derrick at the University of Buffalo showed that watching and
thinking about the characters in our favourite TV shows really can
help us combat feelings of loneliness and rejection – a benefit Derrick
described as social surrogacy.
The Facebook generation
How has the Internet affected our personal relationships? Social
networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have grown at a formi-
dable rate, and the suddenness of their rise has led to plenty of