Study finds a disconnect between brain activity and feelings in lonely people

Loneliness acts as more than a fleeting emotional state; it functions as a persistent filter that alters how the human brain processes the social world. New research published in the journal Biological Psychology provides evidence that this condition changes the neural mechanisms responsible for evaluating threats and regulating emotions.

The study demonstrates that applying a mild, targeted electrical current to the frontal lobe can help lonely individuals perceive negative social scenes as less distressing. These findings offer a new perspective on the disconnect between how lonely people react to their environment physiologically and how they consciously perceive those reactions.

Social isolation is widely recognized as a risk factor for a variety of physical and mental health issues. These range from increased susceptibility to cardiovascular disease to a higher likelihood of developing neurodegenerative disorders. Psychologists have long sought to understand the cognitive machinery that drives these negative outcomes. One prominent framework is the Evolutionary Theory of Loneliness. This theory suggests that isolation triggers a state of hypervigilance. The lonely brain becomes obsessively tuned to social signals in an effort to reconnect with others.

This constant scanning for social cues can lead to a depletion of cognitive resources. When the brain is busy monitoring for threats, it may have less capacity remaining to manage or regulate emotional responses. Szymon Mąka and his colleagues at the Institute of Psychology within the Polish Academy of Sciences designed a study to test these theoretical mechanisms. Mąka and senior author Łukasz Okruszek had previously noted a paradox in their research. They observed that lonely individuals often display strong physiological reactions to negative social cues. Despite this bodily response, these same individuals frequently report feeling lower levels of emotional arousal compared to non-lonely people.

This discrepancy suggests that loneliness might not simply break the brain’s ability to regulate emotion. Instead, it may disrupt the self-monitoring processes that allow a person to accurately interpret their own internal state. To investigate this, the researchers focused on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This region of the brain sits just behind the forehead and acts as a control center for executive functions. It plays a primary role in top-down processing, which is the ability of higher-level thoughts to regulate lower-level emotional impulses.

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The research team recruited 120 participants for the experiment. They stratified these volunteers into two distinct groups based on their scores on the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale. One group consisted of sixty individuals who reported high levels of loneliness. The other group consisted of sixty individuals who reported low levels of loneliness. The researchers aimed to see if manipulating the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex could alter how these groups processed negative imagery.

To manipulate brain activity, the researchers employed a technique known as transcranial direct current stimulation. This non-invasive method involves placing electrodes on the scalp to deliver a weak electrical current to specific brain areas. The current can temporarily increase or decrease the excitability of the neurons underneath. In this study, participants attended two separate sessions. In one session, they received active anodal stimulation, which generally enhances neuronal activity, applied to either the left or right side of the prefrontal cortex. In the other session, they received a sham stimulation.

The sham condition served as a control. The device would ramp up to mimic the physical sensation of the stimulation starting but would then turn off. This ensured that the participants could not distinguish between the active and control sessions. This double-blind design prevented the participants’ expectations from influencing the results. While receiving the stimulation, participants sat before a computer screen while wearing a cap equipped with sensors to record electroencephalography, or EEG, data.

The researchers presented the participants with a series of images. Some of these pictures depicted negative social content, such as scenes of violence or accidents. Others depicted negative non-social content, such as spiders or snakes. Neutral images were also included as a baseline. For each image, the participants received one of two instructions. They were told either to simply “watch” the image passively or to “reappraise” it. Cognitive reappraisal is a strategy where a person mentally reframes a situation to reduce its emotional impact. For example, a participant might view a bloody scene and remind themselves that it is a fake scene from a movie.

After viewing each image, participants rated how negative they felt and how intense their emotional arousal was. Simultaneously, the EEG sensors recorded event-related potentials. These are specific changes in the brain’s electrical activity that occur in response to a stimulus. The researchers were particularly interested in the Late Positive Potential. This is a brain wave pattern that typically reflects the amount of attention and cognitive resources the brain is dedicating to an emotional stimulus.

The analysis revealed a specific effect regarding how stimulation influenced the lonely group. When highly lonely participants received active stimulation to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, they rated negative social images as less unpleasant compared to the sham condition. This change in perceived valence occurred during the passive watching condition. This suggests that boosting activity in the left frontal lobe helped lonely individuals dampen their immediate, automatic negative evaluation of social threats.

The physiological data provided a layer of complexity to these behavioral findings. Despite the lonely participants reporting that they felt less negativity, their brain wave patterns did not show a corresponding drop in activity. The electrical markers of emotional processing remained similar between the active and sham conditions for this group. This finding aligns with the researchers’ earlier hypothesis regarding a disconnect in self-awareness. It appears that loneliness may impair the ability to map internal physiological responses onto conscious feelings. The stimulation altered the subjective report without necessarily changing the underlying neural magnitude of the threat response.

The study also yielded results regarding the general mechanism of cognitive reappraisal across all participants. When the researchers analyzed the data for the entire sample, they found that active stimulation enhanced the neural modulation associated with reappraisal. Specifically, there was a larger difference in the Late Positive Potential between the reappraisal condition and the passive watching condition during active stimulation. This effect was specific to social stimuli.

This indicates that the stimulation successfully helped the brain engage the neural circuits required to regulate emotions. However, a divergence appeared here as well. While the brain data showed enhanced regulation, the participants rated the images as more negative during the reappraisal trials under active stimulation than they did under sham stimulation. This implies that while the brain was working harder to reframe the images, the participants subjectively felt that their attempts at regulation were less effective.

The authors interpret these findings as evidence that the left and right sides of the prefrontal cortex may have distinct roles. Previous studies have often linked the right side to deliberate cognitive control and the left side to more automatic emotional processing. The current results support the idea that the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex helps modulate spontaneous affective evaluations. For lonely individuals, whose automatic processing of social threats may be biased, stimulation of this region provided a specific benefit in reducing subjective distress.

There are limitations to the study that warrant consideration. The use of electrical stimulation during EEG recording can introduce noise into the data, which requires extensive processing to remove. This can sometimes affect the clarity of the brain signals. The experimental task was also relatively brief to fit within the time window where the electrical stimulation is most effective. In daily life, regulating emotions in response to social isolation is a prolonged process that may not be fully captured by looking at a picture for a few seconds.

Additionally, the study relied on young adult participants. It is not yet clear if these findings would apply to older adults, who are often the focus of loneliness research. The researchers also note that they did not include a direct measure of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. Future studies would benefit from asking participants to explicitly evaluate how well they think they are tracking their own emotions.

Despite these caveats, the research highlights that loneliness is not merely a problem of feeling too much or regulating too little. It involves a complex mismatch between the brain’s automatic reactions and the individual’s conscious experience of the social world. By showing that targeted brain stimulation can shift these subjective evaluations, the study opens potential avenues for understanding how neural interventions might one day support therapies for social isolation.

The study, “Targeted neuromodulation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex alleviates altered affective response evaluation in lonely individuals,” was authored by Szymon Mąka, Marta Chrustowicz, and Łukasz Okruszek.