The effect of long term loneliness on the brain and social interaction shows that lonely people tend to create a barrier, a shell, around themselves. Then, they tend to focus on negative aspects in the world around them.
One
of the saddest things about loneliness is that it leads to what
psychologists call a “negative spiral.” People who feel isolated come to
dread bad social experiences and they lose faith that it’s possible to
enjoy good company. The usual result
is more loneliness. This hardly seems adaptive, but experts say it’s
because we’ve evolved to enter a self-preservation mode when we’re
alone. Without the backup of friends and family, our brains become alert
to threat, especially the potential danger posed by strangers.
Until
now, much of the evidence to support this account has come from
behavioral studies. For example, when shown a video depicting a social
scene, lonely people tend to spend more time than others looking for signs of social threat, such as a person being ignored by their friends or one person turning their back on another. Research also shows that lonely people’s attention seems to be grabbed more
quickly by words that pertain to social threat, such as rejected or
unwanted.
Now
the University of Chicago’s husband-and-wife research team of Stephanie
and John Cacioppo — leading authorities on the psychology and
neuroscience of loneliness — have teamed up with their colleague,
Stephen Balogh, to provide the first evidence that lonely people’s
brains, compared to the non-lonely, are exquisitely alert to the
difference between social and nonsocial threats. The finding, reported in the journal, Cortex, supports the broader theory that, for evolutionary reasons,
loneliness triggers a cascade of brain-related changes that put us into a
socially nervous, vigilant mode.
The
researchers used a loneliness questionnaire to recruit 38 very lonely
people and 32 people who didn’t feel lonely (note that loneliness was
defined here as the subjective feeling of isolation, as opposed to the
number of friends or close relatives one has). Next, the researchers
placed an electrode array of 128 sensors on each of the participants’
heads, allowing them to record the participants’ brain waves using an
established technique known as electro-encephalography (EEG) that’s
particularly suited to measuring brain activity changes over very short
time periods.
With
the apparatus in place, the participants were asked to look at various
words on a computer screen and to indicate with keyboard keys, as
quickly as possible, what color they were written in.
This is an
adaptation of a classic psychology test known as the Stroop Test. The
idea is that since participants are asked to focus not on the word
itself but on its color, any influence that the word’s meaning has on
the participant is considered to be automatic and subconscious.
Some
of the words were social and positive in nature (e.g., belong and
party), some were social and negative (e.g., alone and solitary), while
others were emotionally positive but nonsocial (e.g., joy), and others
were nonsocial and emotionally negative (e.g., sad). The researchers
were specifically interested in when and how the participants’ brains
responded to the sight of negative words that were social in nature,
compared to those that were nonsocial. To do this, they analyzed the
participants’ brain waves to see when, after looking at different word
types, their brains entered discrete “microstates,” which are periods of
relative stability when a sustained pattern of brain regions are
activated. When the brain enters a new microstate, this is a sign that
it has initiated a new mental operation — that it’s processing some
stimulus in a new way.
For
the first 280 milliseconds (about one-quarter of a second) after a word
was shown on the screen, lonely people’s brains entered a series of
three discrete microstates that were identical whether a negative word
was socially relevant or not. After that point, however, their brains
entered a distinct microstate in response to socially negative words —
with activation particularly notable in neural areas involved in the
control of attention — suggesting that they had entered a highly
vigilant mode. By comparison, non-lonely people’s brains continued to
respond with the same microstates to social and nonsocial negative words
for a full 480 milliseconds (nearly half a second). This difference
between lonely and non-lonely people’s brains might sound subtle, but
this is an important finding because it shows how lonely people’s brains
are primed at a basic level to tune into social threats more quickly
than is “normal.”
Because
these effects occurred so early on in the lonely participants’ response
to negative social words — and because this was all done in the context
of the Stroop Test (where you focus on the word’s color, not the
meaning) — the researchers say this shows lonely people’s vigilance to
social threat is an implicit, nonconscious bias. In other words, it’s
not something they’re aware of. The participants weren’t even meant to
be paying attention to the words’ meaning, yet lonely people picked up
on the difference between a socially threatening word like hostile and a
negative nonsocial word like vomit more quickly than non-lonely people
did.
In
a real-world context, this is a troubling finding. When people feel
most alone, these results suggest their brains are not tuned in to
smiles and laughter, they’re switched on to frowns and snarls — they’re
vigilantly looking out for negativity without really knowing it. This
might have helped our distant ancestors stay alive back when lacking
social ties was more of a direct threat to one’s well-being than it is
today, making it evolutionarily adaptive. But in the modern world, it’s a
stressful, unhelpful state to be in. It might even help explain why
lonely people often have poorer health and shorter lives than people who
feel connected and cared for.
If you take this research and apply it the LOST character base, the light is shown on the motivations of the characters. Many did see social threats all around them, even to the point of paranoia (like Ben, and Locke). Kate looked to the negative aspects of people around her, and when something got "good" and "positive," she fled that person (her husband, and Jack). In fact, some people with the mind set of negative behavior will push themselves toward more destructive behavior (such as Desmond and his ill-advised and nonsensical of the solo voyage across the Pacific to prove his true love to Penny or Charlie's spiral into drug use when his brother left the band to start a new family.)
