Posts tagged loneliness
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Oxytocin gene partly responsible for how adolescents feel in company
Loneliness: could there be a genetic explanation for it? Yes, to some extent! At least in the case of young female adolescents who, it appears, are more likely to feel lonely in everyday life if they have a specific variant of the gene that regulates how oxytocin – also known as the ‘bonding hormone’ – is received in the brain. Boys who carry this variant are not lonelier but, like girls, respond more strongly to a negative social environment. These findings were published this week in the academic journal PlosONE.
Oxytocin is a hormone with an important role in social behaviour. In the period following birth, it is an important factor in the bonding process between mother and baby, but it also has an influence on other relationships. The gene that regulates oxytocin-sensitivity in the brain varies between one person and another. Some people are less sensitive to oxytocin and therefore more likely to feel lonely. Various indicators have already suggested this. This prompted a group of behavioural researchers in Nijmegen to carry out a fresh and in-depth study of oxytocin effects in a group in which ‘belonging’ is of paramount importance: young adolescents.
A large group, frequently surveyed
The study involved 278 adolescents, 58 per cent of whom were girls. They were contacted via their smartphones nine times a day over a six-day period and asked to report how they felt and who they were with. The presence of the variant of the oxytocin receptor gene OXTR was also determined. ‘This is a new approach to researching the interaction between gene variation and the environment,’ explains Eeske van Roekel, the lead author of the article published online in PlosONE on Monday 4 November. ‘By asking the subjects nine times a day “How do you feel? Who are you with? What do you think of the people you are with?,” we managed to put together a clear picture of how adolescents feel in everyday life. These real-time reports are more reliable than responses after the event.’
Lonelier with specific OXTR variant
‘Our most important finding was that girls who carried a certain variant of the oxytocin gene in their DNA felt lonelier than girls who did not. Boys with this variant were also adversely affected by negative company at the weekend: their feelings increased the longer they were in such company, while boys without this variant were unaffected. These findings apply to both boys and girls.’ The measured effects are small but still relevant, says Van Roekel. ‘These methods reveal more about actual everyday experiences than methods that ask people once at a later date to describe how they felt.’ Heightened sensitivity to negative company in the case of this specific variant was only visible at weekends. How can that be explained? ‘We surmise that it’s because you have more freedom in the weekend to choose the people you mix with than through the week,’ says Van Roekel. ‘Then it makes a deeper impression if they treat you in a negative manner.’
New trend
No-one knows yet exactly how the receptor gene works. ‘We still don’t know how it translates into, for example, oxytocin levels in the brain,’ says Van Roekel. ‘So more research is needed on that front.’ Research on connections between genes and behaviour is developing gradually. ‘We think that our approach, which takes multiple measurements in the daily life of adolescents, has a lot to offer when it comes to discovering connections.’ Van Roekel conducted her research in the group of Professor Rutger Engels at the Behavioural Science Institute of Radboud University Nijmegen.
Loneliness? It’s all a state of mind
Researchers from UCL have found that lonely people have less grey matter in a part of the brain associated with decoding eye gaze and other social cues.
Published in the journal of Current Biology, the study also suggests that through training people might be able to improve their social perception and become less lonely.
“What we’ve found is the neurobiological basis for loneliness,” said lead author Dr Ryota Kanai (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). “Before conducting the research we might have expected to find a link between lonely people and the part of the brain related to emotions and anxiety, but instead we found a link between loneliness and the amount of grey matter in the part of the brain involved in basic social perception.”
To see how differences in loneliness might be reflected in the structure of the brain regions associated with social processes, the team scanned the brains of 108 healthy adults and gave them a number of different tests. Loneliness was self-reported and measured using a UCLA loneliness scale questionnaire.
When looking at full brain scans they saw that lonely individuals have less greymatter in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS)—an area implicated in basic social perception, confirming that loneliness was associated with difficulty in processing social cues.
“The pSTS plays a really important role in social perception, as it’s the initial step of understanding other people,” said Dr Kanai. “Therefore the fact that lonely people have less grey matter in their pSTS is likely to be the reason why they have poorer perception skills.”
In order to gauge social perception, participants were presented with three different faces on a screen and asked to judge which face had misaligned eyes and whether they were looking either right or left. Lonely people found it much harder to identify which way the eyes were looking, confirming the link between loneliness, the size of the pSTS and the perception of eye gaze.
“From the study we can’t tell if loneliness is something hardwired or environmental,” said co-author Dr Bahador Bahrami (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). “But one possibility is that people who are poor at reading social cues may experience difficulty in developing social relationships, leading to social isolation and loneliness.”
One way to counter this loneliness could be through social perception training with a smartphone app.
“The idea of training is one way to address this issue, as by maybe using a smartphone app to improve people’s basic social perception such as eye gaze, hopefully we can help them to lead less lonely lives,” said Dr Kanai.
(Source: ucl.ac.uk)