Two neuroimaging studies found that lonely individuals’ neural representations of well-known celebrities diverged from those typical for their group in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain. Lonelier individuals were also more likely to use unusual language when describing well-known celebrities and to describe them in ways that were not typical for their group. The research was published in Communications Psychology.
Loneliness is the subjective feeling of being socially isolated or lacking meaningful connections, regardless of actual social contact. It can arise from life transitions, such as moving, losing a loved one, or retiring, as well as from social rejection or a lack of supportive relationships.
Chronic loneliness is linked to mental health issues like depression and anxiety, as well as physical health problems, including weakened immunity, cardiovascular disease, and an increased risk of mortality. Lonely individuals tend to experience lower self-esteem, heightened sensitivity to social rejection, and difficulty forming or maintaining relationships. They may also perceive social interactions more negatively, creating a cycle that reinforces their isolation. In older adults, loneliness is particularly concerning, as it is strongly associated with cognitive decline and dementia. In children and adolescents, it can hinder social development and academic performance.
Study author Timothy W. Broom and his colleagues hypothesized that lonely individuals form mental representations of contemporary culture that deviate from those generally accepted in their social environment. In other words, they think in unusual ways. Because of this, lonely individuals tend to perceive that their ideas are not shared by others, which is a defining feature of loneliness.
Research has shown that socially connected individuals (e.g., friends or romantic partners) tend to have similar neural responses to popular culture media. Building on this, the researchers hypothesized that lonely individuals would have neural responses to popular culture topics (e.g., celebrities) that differ from those of the majority in their group. Additionally, the way they speak about these topics would also be unusual. The researchers conducted two studies to explore these ideas.
The first study analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data collected from two groups of participants, consisting of 80 individuals in total, with an average age of 20–21 years. While undergoing fMRI scans, participants completed an evaluation asking them to assess their own traits, traits of selected close others, acquaintances, and five well-known celebrities (Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg). They also rated how close they felt to each of the individuals they evaluated and completed a separate assessment of loneliness using the UCLA Loneliness Scale.
The second study was an online survey conducted with 923 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, whose average age was 40 years. Participants completed the same loneliness assessment as in the first study and answered a series of questions about a prominent celebrity. Participants were first given a list of 10 celebrities and asked to indicate which ones they were familiar with. A celebrity from their list was then randomly chosen, and participants were asked to describe that celebrity in their own words, as if they were describing them to a friend. Following this, participants rated how close they felt to the celebrity and assessed the extent to which the celebrity possessed various psychological traits from a presented list.
The results of the first study indicated that lonely participants’ neural representations of celebrities diverged from those of the rest of the group. Pairwise comparisons of participants’ brain responses while performing the celebrity evaluation task focused on the medial prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in encoding and retrieving social knowledge. The researchers found that brain responses of lonely individuals in this region were less similar to those of other participants, compared to individuals who felt less lonely. This likely suggests that lonely individuals think about celebrities in more unusual ways.
Interestingly, the study also revealed a particularly strong consensus among participants regarding the neural representations of Justin Bieber compared to the other four celebrities.
In the second study, the researchers conducted a text analysis using Google’s Universal Sentence Encoder to examine the descriptions participants provided about celebrities. They computed the semantic similarity between all possible pairs of participant texts. The analysis revealed that texts written by lonelier individuals tended to be less similar to those written by other participants. Moreover, lonelier individuals were more likely to report feeling that their perceptions of celebrities were inaccurate or not shared by those around them.
“Shared reality fosters social connections between people and increases confidence in one’s knowledge because it is corroborated by others. Our findings provide evidence that loneliness is associated with deviations from the zeitgeist, specifically when it comes to perceptions of well-known celebrities,” the study authors concluded.
“Loneliness corresponded with idiosyncratic [unusual, unique] neural representations of celebrities as well as more idiosyncratic communication about celebrities, particularly when an otherwise strong consensus existed between less lonely people. Lonely individuals’ feeling that their ideas are not shared by the people around them is more than metaphorical; it is objectively reflected in idiosyncratic knowledge of contemporary culture that strays from the consensus.”
This study contributes to the scientific understanding of loneliness. However, it primarily focused on chronic loneliness, as assessed by the study’s measures. Loneliness can also be a temporary or transitory state, and it remains uncertain whether these findings apply solely to chronically lonely individuals or if they also extend to temporary experiences of loneliness.
The paper, “Loneliness corresponds with neural representations and language use that deviate from shared cultural perceptions,” was authored by Timothy W. Broom, Siddhant Iyer, Andrea L. Courtney, and Meghan L. Meyer.
