Loneliness and losing the reflex to mimic other people's smiles
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Loneliness is a “disease”, associated with an increased risk of death equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Strides have been made in understanding what form of loneliness is damaging (a lack of close relationships with other people, rather than a lack of relationships per se), but ways to tackle loneliness are badly needed. Now a new study, available as a preprint on PsyArXiv, reveals a way in which loneliness seems to be maintained and, therefore, a potential route to an intervention.
A popular model of loneliness holds that it is maintained by abnormal processing of the social signals – such as smiles and eye contact – that underlie positive social interactions. One consequence of this abnormal processing could be a failure to automatically mimic other people’s facial expressions – a phenomenon that occurs naturally during most social interactions. To investigate for the first time whether this is the case, Andrew Arnold and Piotr Winkielman at the University of California, San Diego conducted a small, preliminary study on 35 student volunteers.