Loneliness May Be Catching

Like the Flu, Loneliness Can Be Infectious

By Cynthia Ross Cravit

Like the flu, loneliness can be infectious. Read our tips for easing the pain. People who are struggling with a persistent sense of loneliness or social isolation may cause other people to feel lonely — even people they don’t actually know. In much the same way that strong emotions such as happiness can spread through social networks, a new US study has found that loneliness can travel from person to person, up to three degrees of separation.

So in other words, if your neighbour’s boss’s cousin is feeling lonely, you just might feel it too. The study, published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging, followed more than 5,000 participants of the Framingham Heart Study from 1971 to 2001. It was the second generation of a study that began back in 1948 to identify risk factors for cardiovascular disease and has since been expanded to study topics such as obesity, happiness and loneliness. For the loneliness portion of the study, researchers evaluated participants every two to four years and at the same time collected names of their friends and family members.

Using these records, the researchers then constructed graphs mapping the subjects’ social histories as well as information about their reports of feeling lonely. From this a pattern emerged: Lonely people were, over time, seemingly ‘infecting’ the people around them with loneliness. In fact, if one person reported feeling lonely at one evaluation, his closest connections were 52 per cent more likely to report feeling lonely two years later. The timing, researchers say, rules out the possibility that lonely people simply sought out one another. And while loneliness was most contagious among close friends and family members, it remained significant up to three degrees of separation — or to your friend’s friend’s friend.

This article was courtesy of 50Plus.

Alone Together

On one level, this finding may seem counterintuitive — after all, aren’t lonely people often alone? But social scientists say that loneliness is defined more by the quality of a person’s relationships and perceived social isolation, than the actual number of friends or family members he or she may have. So we can feel unbearably lonely even if we’re not alone — and it is the negative or distrustful behavior lonely people often exhibit that is infectious.

“We detected an extraordinary pattern of contagion that leads people to be moved to the edge of the social network when they become lonely,” said University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo, leader of the study 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.”

A Curable Disease?

So what can be done to ease loneliness? If you’re feeling cut off or ‘out of the loop’, here are some ways to broaden your network and become more engaged socially: Revitalize friendships or family relationships. Life is hectic and it’s all too easy to lose touch with friends or even family members. If you haven’t spoken to someone for a while and haven’t felt comfortable trying to get back in touch, drop the guilt (and the grudges) and reach out. Choose your friends carefully.

As much as possible surround yourself with happy, upbeat people, because similar to loneliness, happiness is also contagious. And even if you’re feeling down, try to remain positive — too much negativity and unrelenting misery can eventually damage a relationship. Continue challenging yourself. Learning is indeed a lifelong adventure — and an excellent opportunity to expand your social network. Whether it means learning new skills for your work or simply learning for the joy of it, continuing education courses offer a meaningful way to network and make new friends. On a more informal level, book clubs and lecture series are good ways to expand your mind — and your network.