Loneliness is a crucial health factor. This has been shown by research carried out in the last decade . It carries serious risks to physical and mental health and increases mortality. Now, in new work published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, a team of scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine (USA) have discovered which specific brain regions respond to emotional stimuli. related to loneliness: the place where loneliness is lodged in our brain.
The loss of interpersonal connections has become so common in our society today that it has generated what we popularly call the “epidemic of loneliness” and is that, among other things, loneliness places us at greater risk of suffering from depression, dementia and coronary heart disease . It is a major public health problem.
“We were interested in how loneliness and wisdom relate to emotional bias, that is, how we respond to different positive and negative emotions,” says Jyoti Mishra, director of NEATLabs and lead author of the study.
Wisdom and loneliness
Studies show that countering the negativity of loneliness is the positive and protective personality trait of wisdom, defined as the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, perception, and empathy towards others.
In his study, loneliness and wisdom appear as totally opposite emotional stimuli.
The researchers had the participation of 147 people, between 18 and 85 years old. The objective was to know their response to different negative and positive emotions and to see how these were related to emotional prejudices. They asked participants to perform a simple cognitive task of determining which way an arrow was pointing while faces with different emotions were presented in the background. “We found that when angry faces were presented as distracting elements, they significantly slowed down simple cognitive responses in lonelier individuals. This meant that lonelier people paid more attention to threatening stimuli, such as angry faces, “explains Mishra.
“For wisdom, on the other hand, we found a significant positive relationship for response speed when faces with happy emotions were shown, specifically individuals who displayed wiser traits, such as empathy, had faster responses in the presence of happy stimuli.”
Greater emotional balance = less loneliness
The reactions were verified using brain images (EEG, electroencephalograms), finding neurobiological markers that reacted in the opposite way in those people with loneliness-oriented habits compared to those who develop in life with a much more empathetic attitude. Specifically, the area of the brain called the temporal-parietal junction was activated differently in lonelier individuals than in wiser individuals.
In humans, brain activity within a frequency range of 4 and 7 Hz is called theta activity. Theta rhythms on the EEG are typically detected on the sides of the head when we are in a relaxed or asleep waking state, while beta waves in the 12 to 38 Hz range dominate when we are awake, alert, and engaged. Loneliness was associated with increased theta activity driven by angry stimuli at the temporoparietal junction, while wisdom was associated with increased theta activity during happy stimulus processing. This region is important for processing the theory of mind or the degree of empathy and understanding capacity of others.
This discovery demonstrates that loneliness and wisdom modulate cognitive neural processing in the context of emotional bias.
“These findings are relevant to people’s mental and physical health, because they give us objective neurobiological control over how the loneliest or most empathetic individuals process emotional information. Having biological markers that we can measure in the brain can help us develop effective treatments ”, concludes the expert.
Referencia: Cognitive and Neural Correlates of Loneliness and Wisdom during Emotional Bias. Gillian Grennan, Pragathi Priyadharsini Balasubramani, Fahad Alim, Mariam Zafar-Khan, Ellen E Lee, Dilip V Jeste and Jyoti Mishra. Cerebral Cortex (2021).DOI:https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhab012
