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The Lethality of Loneliness

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Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#11

Post by err_badprocrast »

btipling wrote: post #2

In a very good sociology course I took in college the professor drew an upside down bell curve on the board. The y axis was risk for suicide and the x axis was social interaction. The extremes of social interactions, very low or very high amounts, led to being at greater risk for suicide according to research quoted by the professor. Average amounts of social interactions had the lowest risk for suicide. I don't reme…

FTA: 'Loneliness “is not synonymous with being alone, nor does being with others guarantee protection from feelings of loneliness,” writes John Cacioppo, the leading psychologist on the subject. Cacioppo privileges the emotion over the social fact because—remarkably—he’s sure that it’s the feeling that wreaks havoc on the body and brain. Not everyone agrees with him, of course. Another school of thought insists that loneliness is a failure of social networks. The lonely get sicker than the non-lonely, because they don’t have people to take care of them; they don’t have social support.'

From experience I definitely agree that having very little/no social interaction is not synonymous with loneliness.

I'm curious whether the social interaction/suicide relation is correlation or causation.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#12

Post by loceng »

btipling wrote: post #2

In a very good sociology course I took in college the professor drew an upside down bell curve on the board. The y axis was risk for suicide and the x axis was social interaction. The extremes of social interactions, very low or very high amounts, led to being at greater risk for suicide according to research quoted by the professor. Average amounts of social interactions had the lowest risk for suicide. I don't reme…

It could be people who seek out socializing are trying to distract themselves or are seeking for something external when they're needing are internal skills to manage life and the internal issues (emotions, etc) they create.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#13

Post by xxchan »

> It’s tempting to say that the lonely were born that way—it’d let the rest of us off the hook. And, as it turns out, we’d be about half right, because loneliness is about half heritable. A longitudinal study of more than 8,000 identical Dutch twins found that, if one twin reported feeling lonely and unloved, the other twin would report the same thing 48 percent of the time. This figure held so steady across the pairs of twins—young or old, male or female, notwithstanding different upbringings—that researchers concluded that it had to reflect genetic, not environmental, influence. To understand what it means for a personality trait to have 48 percent heritability, consider that the influence of genes on a purely physical trait is 100 percent. Children get the color of their eyes from their parents, and that is that. But although genes may predispose children toward loneliness, they do not account for everything that makes them grow up lonely. Fifty-two percent of that comes from the world.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the math is wrong. Assume prior for being lonely is 50/50. Now, if 100% of twins reported that they are also lonely, this would be proof that loneliness is genetic. If it was 0%, it would imply some sadistic inverse relationship, but one that'd still be genetic. If it's 50%, the same as the prior, it means no relationship. 48% is pretty close.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#14

Post by sliverstorm »

loceng wrote: post #12
btipling wrote: post #2

In a very good sociology course I took in college the professor drew an upside down bell curve on the board. The y axis was risk for suicide and the x axis was social interaction. The extremes of social interactions, very low or very high amounts, led to being at greater risk for suicide according to research quoted by the professor. Average amounts of social interactions had the lowest risk for suicide. I don't reme…

It could be people who seek out socializing are trying to distract themselves or are seeking for something external when they're needing are internal skills to manage life and the internal issues (emotions, etc) they create.

Or being hyper-social puts way more pressure on you in the form of keeping up appearances and maintaining expectations.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#15

Post by jacobolus »

xxchan wrote: post #13

> It’s tempting to say that the lonely were born that way—it’d let the rest of us off the hook. And, as it turns out, we’d be about half right, because loneliness is about half heritable. A longitudinal study of more than 8,000 identical Dutch twins found that, if one twin reported feeling lonely and unloved, the other twin would report the same thing 48 percent of the time. This figure held so steady across the pair…

You’re misunderstanding “heritability”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Methods

The study in question: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17564516

PDF: http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcre...

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#16

Post by navs »

So what do you folks do to combat loneliness? I've tried meetup.com but the groups I joined haven't quite worked out for me. Outside of work acquaintances and classmates, I don't socialize.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#17

Post by pond_lilly »

I am surprised that this study only mentioned pets very briefly in the end. Pets have been demonstrated to be a very good substitute for social interactions, in fact they can be less stressful than forcing interactions with other people just for the sake of being "social".

I also found something else interesting in this article, the mention of someone being expelled from the tribe and how bad it is. Well, our modern social lives are nothing like a tribe. If it was, then all sociopaths/psychopaths would have been expelled because they cheat, lie, oppress the tribe and make its life miserable. But as we see in today's society is clearly not the case.

Also surprisingly the article does not dwell much on extroversion/introversion which is very relevant, what is unbearable for an extravert, is not that bad for an introvert. Maybe the author of this article is an extrovert and is terrified of being alone, just like introverts are terrified of being locked in a room with 10 chatter boxes that never shut up.

Think about people you are with. You might get married just to avoid loneliness, but if you do not love this person can you expect to escape loneliness and lack of intimacy? You can stay in touch with people you have nothing in common, but does it not make your loneliness even worse? When there is an elderly in a family and no one gives a hoot even though the family is around how is it not being lonely? It is not a quantity of interactions but quality, I am surprised the article fails to make this distinction.

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#18

Post by 6ren »

btipling wrote: post #2

In a very good sociology course I took in college the professor drew an upside down bell curve on the board. The y axis was risk for suicide and the x axis was social interaction. The extremes of social interactions, very low or very high amounts, led to being at greater risk for suicide according to research quoted by the professor. Average amounts of social interactions had the lowest risk for suicide. I don't reme…

The Middle Way works for a lot of things (aka goldilocks, all things in moderation).

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#19

Post by xxchan »

jacobolus wrote: post #15
xxchan wrote: post #13

> It’s tempting to say that the lonely were born that way—it’d let the rest of us off the hook. And, as it turns out, we’d be about half right, because loneliness is about half heritable. A longitudinal study of more than 8,000 identical Dutch twins found that, if one twin reported feeling lonely and unloved, the other twin would report the same thing 48 percent of the time. This figure held so steady across the pair…

You’re misunderstanding “heritability”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Methods The study in question: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17564516 PDF: http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/cacioppo/jtcre...

I see, obviously the math is a bit more involved. I assumed those 8000 were identical twins who were separated at birth. Thank you

Re: The Lethality of Loneliness

#20

Post by virtualwhys »

and then there are the twinkle eyed ones that spend huge amounts of time alone (hermits, monks/nuns on long term solo retreat). It probably has less to do with being alone than feeling alone.

For lay people, however, living alone in the world goes against the grain; hard not to feel like an odd ball.

Something the article does not touch on is accepting the reality of alone-ness: we're all alone together (quote from an old friend).

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