Feeling alone is bad on a psychological level, but also on a cognitive one
Human beings are social animals, said Aristotle. And an international study confirms this. Research, conducted by the Department of Psychology of Sapienza in collaboration with the Bournmouth University in England, proved that loneliness can affect memory by reducing people’s ability to recognize faces that have already been seen. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The international study has shown that loneliness and memory are linkedespecially in the human ability to recognize faces already seen. Funded by the scientific society Experimental Psychology Society, the study assumes that the human being has a great need for social connections, an innate need “to belong, to be part of”.
The feeling of loneliness comes when this need is not met, either because of a lack of social contacts or because existing social contacts are unsatisfactory. Starting from here, the researchers investigated to what extent the number of social contacts and the loneliness of young students influence the ability to recognize faces of peers and faces of elderly people, both unknown, but previously met.
The research is based on what is known in psychology as theOwn Age Bias and which consists of advantage of the human brain to recognize the faces of peers. The experiment was divided into two phases: in the first phase, the faces of young and old were presented to the students with happy, angry or neutral expressions.
The focus of this phase was the memorization of faces and their classification in young and old. Then faces of young and old were shown again always with happy, angry and neutral expressions. Half of the faces had already been shown in the first phase, half not. The focus of this phase was the recognition of the faces already seen.
“Basically, we asked ourselves if loneliness, by motivating people to re-establish social connections, enhances the recognition of happy faces that represent signs of social affiliation, or that of angry faces that represent signs of social threat, compared to the recognition of neutral faces of people of their own age, seen in precedence”Explained Anna Pecchinenda, researcher of the Sapienza team.
The results obtained revealed that students with low levels of loneliness show higher recognition than very “lonely” colleagues for the smiling faces of previously seen peers.
This result indicates an effect of loneliness on memory, namely that loneliness affects the ability to recognize unfamiliar peoplewhich could be important for establishing social connectionsand suggests a possible phenomenon of perpetuation of loneliness.
Although the mechanisms that lead to the chronic loneliness are still unclear, this is attributed to failure of attempts to re-establish social connections.
In recent years, studies in affective neuroscience have shown that feeling socially isolated has an impact in a negative way not only on emotional well-being, but also on cognitive functions of the individual. So much so that, in older people, chronic loneliness has been associated with a 20% increase in mortality.
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