Loneliness changes hands fast

As lonely people are likely to share their blues with all those around them, their feelings of isolation and despair carry far, thus ‘infecting’ everybody in due course, researchers report in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The Study
The team of researchers from the University of Chicago tracked 5,214 men and women. All were offspring of the original subjects participating in the Framingham Heart Study conducted between 1971 and 2001.

Researcher team, led by John T. Cacioppo, of the University of Chicago, studied each participant’s friendship history and current friendship patterns. The ongoing friendship patterns were tabulated over two to four years span.

Findings of the study
Lonely people have a way of making others feel the isolation, researchers found. Before snapping from their closed ones, lonely people spread their feeling of loneliness and distress to others, attracting fellow "lonelies" to feel lonely, too.

On average, people felt lonely 48 days in a year. The study also underlined the importance of having good friends. With each extra friend, the frequency of feeling lonely lowered by 0.04 days a week.

Another revelation of the study marked that women were more vulnerable than men to attract loneliness. Also, women’s loneliness was more likely to ‘infect’ people in their social networks, researchers noted.

"We detected an extraordinary pattern of contagion that leads people to be moved to the edge of the social network when they become lonely" Cacioppo averred.

"On the periphery people have fewer friends, yet their loneliness leads them to losing the few ties they have left. These reinforcing effects mean that our social fabric can fray at the edges, like a yarn that comes loose at the end of a crocheted sweater."

Need to fight loneliness
Loneliness is home to an array of mental and physical disorders, medics caution.

It should be identified and corrected as soon as possible. Lonely people should be encouraged to interact so as to help them integrate better with others, Mark R. Leary, professor and director of the social psychology program at Duke University recommends.

Zeroing in on the need for social acceptance, Leary said, "It reflects loneliness and a need for connection, rather than indifference, dislike or rejection. People can reach out to their lonely loved one rather than withdraw themselves."

Categorically, "for the mental health provider, this means treating not just the patient, but potentially also the patient's friends. For the employer, this means emphasizing activities that help their employees to connect to one another socially. For the family member, this means you should tend to your own networks, too, while you help your kin feel more connected", study’s co-author, James H. Fowler, professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego emphasized.