John Cacioppo on Loneliness | Big Think

John Cacioppo on Loneliness

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John Cacioppo explains how loneliness differs from anxiety and depression.

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John T. Cacioppo:

John T. Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago, the Director of the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, and the Director of the Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection.

Professor Cacioppo is a Big Think Delphi Fellow.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Cacioppo: Loneliness is the feeling that you’re socially isolated. It’s related to being physically isolated from other people, but it’s not the same thing. One can be lonely in a marriage, lonely in a family, they can be lonely in a crowd. So we found it isn’t the number of contacts or the frequency of interaction with other people, it’s the quality of those interactions. Freshmen who have gone to college find themselves among many, many other people, lots of social activities, they go to mixers, and they look around, everyone else is talking with other people and they’re sitting there, all alone in their head. And so, that actually can make their feeling of isolation greater for that moment. So, being around other people is not what makes people less lonely, it’s feeling connected to other people that makes them feel less lonely.

Question: How does loneliness differ from anxiety or depression?

Cacioppo: Traditionally, loneliness and depression, loneliness and anxiety were treated as very similar constructs, so much so that one of the common measures of depression that’s used in epidemiology has, as one of the questions, “Do you feel lonely?” Our own research and research of others have looked at whether loneliness and depression are the same thing and we find them to be separate constructs. They’re separate mental states. Our longitudinal research and our experimental research has shown that loneliness leads to increased depressive symptomatology. So, if… No matter how depressed you are today, if you’re feeling lonely today, you will be more depressed a year from now, above and beyond which our level of depression today would predict because of the loneliness. We also find that depression lead you to withdrawal, so a difference in depression and loneliness is loneliness makes you want to reach out and contact other people, be a part of that group, be a part of that relationship. Depression is associated with depressed affect but also with lethargy, kind of this withdrawal from others. And, indeed, with depression, we find, over time, people do withdraw from others and that withdrawal and in the increased stress associated with that leads them to feel lonelier. So, you have this pernicious feedback loop, the lonelier they are, the more depressed they’d become. The depressed they are, the more they withdraw and the lonelier they become. If you look at those two effects, though, the effect of loneliness and depression is stronger than the effect of depression on loneliness. People can be depressed for other reasons and feeling lonely, but many people who go in to seek treatment for depression, at the root of the problem is their feeling of disconnection and isolation, and unless that’s treated, the depression or any attempt to fix that is really just kind of a transient band aid. It’s not getting at the root problem.

Question: What are the symptoms of loneliness?

Cacioppo: The measurement of loneliness is somewhat not obvious. People know that they feel isolated. They feel disconnected. They don’t have others on whom they can rely or talk, but it’s mostly they don’t have a confidante. They don’t have anyone who affirms who they are. That’s part of it. Now, if you ask people do they feel lonely, there tends to be this stigma associated with loneliness, I think, or research has suggested that it’s inappropriate stigma, but there’s nevertheless this stigma associated with loneliness. So, people under report. If you ask them, “Do you feel lonely?” they under report. But if you ask them, are there others on whom they can rely, to whom they can relate and whom they can confide, that’s when you start to see people admitting this feeling of isolation. There’s also this sense in which they don’t have a collective identity. So, immediately after 9/11, when we all survived that tragedy, it made being an American salient.

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