Research

Loneliness as a self–other gap

Loneliness is classically measured by agreement with items like “People are around me but not with me” (Russell et al., 1980). This statement highlights the discrepancy between “objective” social isolation and the “subjective” condition of loneliness, which are weakly correlated (e.g., Cacioppo et al., 2010; Rico-Uribe et al., 2016). With support from an NIH predoctoral (F31) training grant, I used fMRI to probe the social cognitive origins of a “self–other gap” in loneliness.

Using representational similarity analysis (RSA), I computed the similarity in brain activity when thinking about the self and other people, including close others, acquaintances, and strangers. Across a set of brain regions associated with social thought (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex [MPFC], posterior cingulate cortex [PCC]), self–other similarity increased as participants thought about people they felt closer to. That is, similarity was greater when thinking about friends than strangers. This validated self–other neural similarity as a brain proxy for social closeness. Next, we found that lonelier individuals showed decreased neural self–other similarity overall (i.e., less similar brain patterns for the self vs. others) in the MPFC. This finding supports the hypothesis that loneliness tracks a self–other gap.

Perceptions and utilization of social support in loneliness

How does the perceived self–other gap unfold in the real world? We hypothesized another gap: in who detects their connections to others. To address this possibility, I compared the number of social network connections reported by lonely people to their “ground truth” connections. In network surveys, students named peers who provide them with social support by responding to the prompt, “Who do you turn to when something bad happens?”. To test whether lonely students systematically under-report these connections, we contrasted two elements of social networks: outdegree, the number of ties reported by participants, and indegree, the number of peers who nominated them. As expected, lonely people reported having fewer peers for social support (outdegree), even controlling for the peer nominations they received (indegree). Lonely people underperceive the social support available in their communities (Courtney et al., in prep).

Do they also fail to access those resources? Supportive social interactions mitigate stress (Bernstein et al., 2018; Fiori & Consedine, 2013), so by failing to connect with others, lonely people may neglect an important (and abundant) mental health resource. A subset of participants reported recent social interactions and momentary stress in experience sampling surveys. Lonely people were less likely to interact with others when under stress; but paradoxically, they benefited more from these interactions, experiencing greater reductions in stress (Courtney et al., in prep). In ongoing work, we are exploring how loneliness biases a person's assessment of their social interactions, including how supportive they are.

Social microclimates and mental health

Social connections are critical to mental health; but less is known about how characteristics of one’s local community—or the “social microclimate”—play a role. In another line of research (Courtney et al., under review), we hypothesized that having friends and neighbors who are empathic and emotionally stable, or residing in a tightly knit community, might bolster mental health. We probed this question among a cohort of first-year college students, who were assigned to local communities (i.e., residence halls) when placed in campus housing. Interestingly, controlling for personality and direct ties, psychological distress negatively tracked two novel features of social microclimates: the density of connections within one’s hall and friends’ emotional stability. Hall density reflects friendships among of one’s neighbors. Students living on halls where no one is close experienced a 16% increase in distress, relative to those on halls where 60% of friendships were between hall mates. This work highlights the importance of considering how an individual’s psychology interacts with their social environment, by contributing to and drawing from the community’s well-being.