New Study: Loneliness can be as detrimental as smoking.

A new study being conducted at the University of Chicago is using fMRI scans to study the connection between loneliness and activity in the brain. While in a claustrophobic fMRI, subjects were shown images of both agreeable and disagreeable things: human conflict, money, happy people, etc., and their brain activity was measured.

Researchers found that non-lonely people were greatly stimulated by pleasant images (i.e. – happy people were even happier when they saw other happy couples) whereas lonely people were not (they didn’t care much to see happy people). Additionally, they found that non-lonely people were also able to empathize more than lonely people when shown unpleasant pictures (and socially isolated people weren’t really affected by others’ in distress).

"Given their feelings of social isolation, lonely individuals may be left to find relative comfort in nonsocial rewards," said John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Professor in Psychology at the University. He has shown that “loneliness undermines health and can be as detrimental as smoking.”

So in conclusion, non-loneliness begets more non-loneliness and loneliness begets nothing good. So get out there and become socially accessible…or it could be as detrimental to your health as lighting up a cancer-stick.

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