Loneliness and memory: a dangerous combination
An international study carried out by the Department of Psychology of Sapienza University of Rome in collaboration with Bournemouth University in England has shown a connection between loneliness and memory, particularly between loneliness and the human ability to recognise faces that have already been seen.
The research, funded by the Experimental Psychology Society and published in the journal Scientific Reports, is based on the assumption that human beings have a strong need for social connections, a need for affiliation, "to belong, to be part of...". The feeling of loneliness comes when this need is not satisfied, either because of a lack of social contacts or because existing social contacts are deemed to be unsatisfactory.
Starting from these elements, the researchers investigated to what extent the number of social contacts and loneliness reported by young students influences the ability to recognise the faces of peers and those of older people, both of whom were unknown but had previously met.
The research is based on an effect known in psychology as the Own Age Bias, which consists of the advantage of the human brain to recognise the faces of people of the same age.
The researchers' experiment consisted of two phases: in the first, the students were presented with faces of young and older people with happy, angry or neutral expressions; the central focus of this phase was memorising the faces and their classification into young and old. Then faces of young and older people were shown again with happy, angry and neutral expressions. Half of the faces had already been shown in the first phase, and half had not. The focus of this phase was the recognition of faces already seen.
'To be specific,' says Anna Pecchinenda, a Sapienza researcher, 'we asked ourselves whether loneliness, by motivating people to re-establish social connections, enhances the recognition of happy faces that represent signals of social affiliation, or that of angry faces that represent signals of social threat, compared to the recognition of neutral faces of people of one's own age, seen before'.
The results revealed that students with low levels of loneliness showed higher recognition than their 'lonely' peers for the smiling faces of previously seen peers.
This result points to an effect of loneliness on memory, i.e. loneliness affects the ability to recognise unfamiliar people, who may be important for establishing social connections, and suggests a possible phenomenon of loneliness perpetuation.
Although the mechanisms that lead to chronic loneliness are still unclear, this phenomenon is attributed to the failure of attempts to re-establish social connections.
In recent years, studies in the field of affective neuroscience have shown that feeling socially isolated negatively affects not only emotional well-being but also the individual's cognitive functions. Indeed, in the elderly, chronic loneliness has been associated with a 20% increase in mortality.
References:
Pizzio, A.P.G., Yankouskaya, A., Alessandri, G. et al. Social contacts and loneliness affect the own age bias for emotional faces. Sci Rep 12, 16134 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-20220-9
Further Information
Anna Pecchinenda
Department of Psychology