Research confirms that “lonely people” tend to think and speak in unusual ways – GIGAZINE

lonely peoplehow the world feelsBeing different from others and feeling lonelygenePrevious research has shown that this is involved. A new study combining brain scans and questionnaires has found that people who feel lonely may think and express their thoughts differently.

Loneliness corresponds with neural representations and language use that deviate from shared cultural perceptions | Communications Psychology
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-024-00088-3

Lonely individuals tend to think and talk in an unusual way, study finds
https://www.psypost.org/lonely-individuals-tend-to-think-and-talk-in-an-unusual-way-study-finds/

Timothy W. Bloom, a psychologist at Columbia University in the United States, and his colleagues suggest that “lonely people may form mental images that deviate from the generally accepted common understanding in society.” To test our hypothesis, we conducted two experiments involving a total of 1003 participants.

In the first experiment, 80 participants, with an average age of 20 to 21, were divided into two groups to examine their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), while observing themselves, an acquaintance, and five famous people. We asked them to evaluate their personality traits.

Evaluations of personality traits were collected using a 5-point scale or binary choice method to determine how applicable the adjectives were to each person.

Celebrities previously identified as having high visibility and cultural importance in another study include Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg. Mr. was selected.

by Anthony Quintano

In this experiment, participants’ loneliness measured by the UCLA Loneliness Scale was compared with each participant’s brain scan data, and it was found that lonely participants were more likely to experience celebrities than those who were less lonely. We found that the brain responses during the evaluation were not very similar to the brain responses of other participants.

The researchers pointed out that this result likely suggests that lonely people have a different way of thinking when thinking about celebrities.

The second experiment involved 923 participants, with an average age of 40 years, recruited online through Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s crowdsourcing service.

In the experiment, participants were asked to explain in their own words how well they knew 10 popular culture celebrities, including Harrison Ford and Keanu Reeves. Participants were measured on their affinity with each celebrity and their evaluation of each celebrity’s personality traits.

In this experiment, the research team conducted text analysis of the participants’ sentences and found that sentences written by participants with high levels of loneliness tended to be less similar to sentences written by other participants. I did. It was also found that lonely people were more likely to have inaccurate perceptions of famous people and to feel that they were not shared with those around them.

The research team wrote in their paper, “Our findings demonstrate that there areZeitgeistthus providing evidence that there is a link between deviation from common perceptions shared by a particular culture and loneliness.”