Loneliness and the Social Brain: How Perceived Social Isolation Impairs Human Interactions
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Abstract
Loneliness is a painful condition associated with increased risk for premature mortality. The formation of new, positive social relationships can alleviate feelings of loneliness, but requires rapid trustworthiness decisions during initial encounters and it is still unclear how loneliness hinders interpersonal trust. Here, a multimodal approach including behavioral, psychophysiological, hormonal, and neuroimaging measurements is used to probe a trust‐based mechanism underlying impaired social interactions in loneliness. Pre‐stratified healthy individuals with high loneliness scores ( n = 42 out of a screened sample of 3678 adults) show reduced oxytocinergic and affective responsiveness to a positive conversation, report less interpersonal trust, and prefer larger social distances compared to controls ( n = 40). Moreover, lonely individuals are rated as less trustworthy compared to controls and identified by the blinded confederate better than chance. During initial trust decisions, lonely individuals exhibit attenuated limbic and striatal activation and blunted functional connectivity between the anterior insula and occipitoparietal regions, which correlates with the diminished affective responsiveness to the positive social interaction. This neural response pattern is not mediated by loneliness‐associated psychological symptoms. Thus, the results indicate compromised integration of trust‐related information as a shared neurobiological component in loneliness, yielding a reciprocally reinforced trust bias in social dyads.
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Lonely individuals are less trusting of others and more anxious and pessimistic than less lonely people.
“Loneliness is consistently associated with withdrawal from social interactions (Qualter et al., 2015), with lonely individuals being less trusting of others and more anxious and pessimistic than less lonely people (Cacioppo et al., 2006;Langenkamp, 2023;Lieberz et al., 2021).”
From Investigating the interplay of loneliness and social isolation across adolescence: Findings from a nationally representative longitudinal study (2026) · cites this paper as Lieberz et al., 2021
The Results sections report that high-lonely participants had less interpersonal trust and heightened anxiety symptoms than low-lonely controls. The Introduction describes anticipated rejection and negative attribution styles, but the paper does not establish that the high-lonely group was more pessimistic than controls. (LLM, conf=0.84)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
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- Authors
- Lieberz, J., Shamay‐Tsoory, S. G., Saporta, N., Esser, T., Kuskova, E., Stoffel‐Wagner, B., Hurlemann, R., & Scheele, D.
- Affiliations
- University Hospital Bonn (DE)
- University of Haifa (IL)
- University of Bonn (DE)
- Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg (DE)
- Corresponding author
- Lieberz, Jana
- Scheele, Dirk
- ORCID
- Venue
- Advanced Science
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2021-09-20
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 21
- Pages
- e2102076-e2102076
- ISSN
- 2198-3844 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8564426
- OpenAlex
- W3200664259
- Semantic Scholar
- 770144c7f077702d2008fff2ac16c84a29d65d76
- Cited by
- 116
- References
- 56
- Citations by year
- 2026: 24 · 2025: 33 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 6
- FWCI
- 14.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Advanced Science (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Neuroendocrine regulation and behavior
- Social Sciences › Health › Health disparities and outcomes
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion
- Keywords
- loneliness, social isolation, interpersonal trust, oxytocin, emotional responsiveness, social distance, anterior insula, striatal activation, social interaction, neuroendocrinology
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Behavior, Brain, Female, Heart Rate, Humans, Immunoglobulin A, Interpersonal Relations, Loneliness, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Oxytocin, Saliva, Social Isolation, Trust, Young Adult
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