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Loneliness Can Be Contagious
Lonely people have a way of making others feel the
isolation, researchers say
By Bill Hendrick
WebMD Health News
Loneliness can spread like a contagious disease, new
research indicates.
Lonely people tend to share their loneliness with
others, and their feelings of isolation and despair
rub off on friends, neighbors, spouses, and even
acquaintances, researchers report in the December
issue of the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology.
The
team of researchers, led by John T. Cacioppo, PhD,
of the University of Chicago, followed 5,214
participants of the Framingham Heart Study from 1971
to 2001. Cacioppo and colleagues studied data on
individuals in a second generation of the study.
“We
detected an extraordinary pattern of contagion that
leads people to be moved to the edge of the social
network when they become lonely,” Cacioppo says in a
news release. “On the periphery, people have fewer
friends, yet their loneliness leads them to losing
the few ties they have left.”
They
found, among other things, that:
On
average, people felt lonely 48 days in a year.
For
each extra friend, you lower the frequency of
feeling lonely by 0.04 days a week which is two
extra days a year.
Lonely people tend to move to the edges of social
circles.
People who are not lonely but who have lonely people
in their social network tend to become lonelier
Women are more likely than men to report greater
degree of loneliness. And, women’s loneliness is
more likely to spread to people in their social
networks.
Peoples’ chances of becoming lonely were more likely
to be influenced by friendship networks than family
networks.
Also, the researchers report that:
Loneliness feeds on itself, as groups develop a
tendency to push lonely people to the periphery of
social networks.
"An
important implication of [the study] is that
interventions to reduce loneliness in our society
may benefit by aggressively targeting the people in
the periphery to help repair their social networks,”
the authors conclude. “By helping them, we might
create a protective barrier against loneliness that
can keep the whole network from unraveling.”
©
WebMD. All rights reserved.
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On average, people felt
lonely 48 days in a year. For each extra
friend, you lower the frequency of feeling
lonely by 0.04 days a week which is two
extra days a year.
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