Researchers attempt to address loneliness amid coronavirus pandemic
The school notes that research performed just in the last decade shows that loneliness tends to be a determining factor for health and longevity.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFAn elderly woman sits in the recreation room of a retirement home as visits have been restricted due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) concerns in Grevenbroich(photo credit: REUTERS)
Researchers at University of California San Diego found that different sectors of the brain respond to emotional stimuli correlated with loneliness and wisdom, the university announced on Friday.Their findings were published in the Oxford Academic journal.“We were interested in how loneliness and wisdom relate to emotional biases, meaning how we respond to different positive and negative emotions,” said lead author of the study, Jyoti Mishra, the director of the NEATLabs and assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine, according to the UC San Diego website.The school said that research performed in the last decade shows that loneliness tends to be a determining factor for health and longevity. Loneliness is associated with "mental health risks and increased mortality."For the study, Mishra and her team had participants determine which way an arrow was pointing as they are exposed to faces sporting different emotions.Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain recordings were used to determine which part of the brain lit up when exposed to the emotional stimuli, and whether their brain processes slowed or sped up.“We found that when faces emoting anger were presented as distractors, they significantly slowed simple cognitive responses in lonelier individuals," Mishra explained. "This meant that lonelier individuals paid more attention to threatening stimuli, such as the angry faces.”“For wisdom, on the other hand, we found a significant positive relationship for response speeds when faces with happy emotions were shown, specifically individuals who displayed wiser traits, such as empathy, had speedier responses in the presence of happy stimuli.”The researchers found that the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ) activated differently in lonely individuals, which controls the brain processes for compassion and empathy, noting that it was more active in the presence of angry emotions. The total opposite was true for the wiser participants, where happy emotions lit up the TPJ more actively.“This study shows that the inverse relationship between loneliness and wisdom that we found in our previous clinical studies is at least partly embedded in neurobiology and is not merely a result of subjective biases,” said co-author Dilip V. Jeste, MD, senior associate dean for the Center of Healthy Aging and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at UC San Diego School of Medicine, in a statement.
“These findings are relevant to the mental and physical health of individuals because they give us an objective neurobiological handle on how lonelier or wiser people process information,” said Mishra. "Having biological markers that we can measure in the brain can help us develop effective treatments. Perhaps we can help answer the question, ‘Can you make a person wiser or less lonely?’ The answer could help mitigate the risk of loneliness.”
