It is known that being lonely, or on the social perimeter, impacts the way a person behaves and interfaces with the world, and is detrimental to health. People who feel isolated from the world come to dread social interaction opportunities, and unfortunately, this leads to a tendency to spiral even further into loneliness. Now, researchers at the University of Chicago have demonstrated that lonely people process external information differently, and that there are observable neural correlates of the subjective report of loneliness. In particular, lonely people anticipate and are highly sensitive to the negative social interactions and cues that will likely serve to worsen their loneliness.
