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Loneliness Can be Contagious

Loneliness, like a bad cold, can spread among groups of people, research at the University of Chicago, the University of California-San Diego and Harvard shows.

Using longitudinal data from a large-scale study that has been following health conditions for more than 60 years, a team of scholars found that lonely people tend to share their loneliness with others. Gradually over time, a group of lonely, disconnected people moves to the fringes of social networks.

“We detected an extraordinary pattern of contagion that leads people to be moved to the edge of the social network when they become lonely,” says University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo, one member of the study team and one of the nation’s leading scholars of loneliness. “On the periphery people have fewer friends, yet their loneliness leads them to losing the few ties they have left.”

Before relationships are severed, people on the periphery transmit feelings of loneliness to their remaining friends, who also become lonely. “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,” says Cacioppo.

Because loneliness is associated with a variety of mental and physical diseases that can shorten life, Cacioppo said it is important for people to recognize loneliness and help those people connect with their social group before the lonely individuals move to the edges.

For the study, the team examined records of the Framingham Heart Study, which has studied people in Framingham, MA, since 1948. The original group, including more than 5,209 people, was originally studied for the risks of cardiovascular disease.

Because the study is longitudinal, researchers kept in touch with the subjects every two to four years and accordingly collected names of friends who knew the subjects. Those records became an excellent source of information about the people’s social networks.

By constructing graphs that charted the subjects’ friendship histories and information about their reports of loneliness, researchers were able to establish a pattern of loneliness that spread as people reported fewer close friends. The data showed that lonely people “infected” the people around them with loneliness, and those people moved to the edges of social circles.

The team found that the next-door neighbors in the survey who experienced an increase of one day of loneliness a week prompted an increase in loneliness among their neighbors who were their close friends. The lonelines

— Source: University of Chicago