Perceived Social Isolation and Cognition

By John T. Cacioppo, Louise C. Hawkley. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2009

1,918 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social species, from Drosophila melanogaster to Homo sapiens, fare poorly when isolated. Homo sapiens, an irrepressibly meaning-making species, are, in normal circumstances, dramatically affected by perceived social isolation. Research indicates that perceived social isolation (i.e., loneliness) is a risk factor for, and may contribute to, poorer overall cognitive performance, faster cognitive decline, poorer executive functioning, more negativity and depressive cognition, heightened sensitivity to social threats, a confirmatory bias in social cognition that is self-protective and paradoxically self-defeating, heightened anthropomorphism, and contagion that threatens social cohesion. These differences in attention and cognition impact emotions, decisions, behaviors, and interpersonal interactions that may contribute to the association between loneliness and cognitive decline and between loneliness and morbidity more generally.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d4a4c5570ff99b343b2743587e096135ebfed4cd

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Citations in the corpus

The Neuroendocrinology of Social Isolation (2014, background): “759 CONCLUDING REMARKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 761”
Loneliness Predicts Increased Blood Pressure: Five-Year Cross-Lagged Analyses in Middle-Aged and Older Adults (2010, methodology): “We are in the process of designing an intervention based on our theory that loneliness is a subjective state of perceived isolation that, without our awareness, colors attention, cognition, and behavior in self-defeating ways (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009).”
Threats to belonging on Facebook: lurking and ostracism (2015, result): “Similar to research on loneliness which finds that subjective isolation predicts outcomes above and beyond objective isolation (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009), subjective satisfaction with feedback is probably the best predictor of belonging.”
A Meta-Analysis of Interventions to Reduce Loneliness (2010, background): “Loneliness impairs executive functioning in part because it triggers implicit hypervigilance for social threats (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009).”
Loneliness Matters: A Theoretical and Empirical Review of Consequences and Mechanisms (2010, positive): “Social evaluative threat is known to be a potent elicitor of cortisol [74], and our theory that loneliness is characterized by chronic threat of and hypervigilance for negative social evaluation [9] is consistent with the finding that loneliness predicts increased cortisol awakening response.”
No Employee an Island: Workplace Loneliness and Job Performance (2018, background): “All of this will increase the negative cycle present in the regulatory model of loneliness (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009), leading to lower approachability.”
Loneliness Across the Life Span (2015, background): “…process may become faulty when lonely people have certain intrapersonal characteristics or are in social environments that make them hypervigilant to social threats, creating a self-reinforcing loop (J. T. Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009) and that includes increased withdrawal and prolonged loneliness.”
Psychobiological Mechanisms Underlying the Social Buffering of the HPA Axis: A Review of Animal Models and Human Studies across Development (2013, background): “Testifying to the importance of emotional support, studies have shown that perceived or subjective loneliness is an important predictor of psychosocial functioning and morbidity (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009).”
The Neurobiology of Social Distance (2020, neutral): “The feeling of loneliness has been found to spread from person to person through social networks [3].”
Because I (Don't) Deserve It: How Relationship Reminders and Deservingness Influence Consumer Indulgence (2014, background): “Humans are social beings, and as a result, societal norms are that healthy people have close relationships (Cacioppo and Hawkley 2009; Conley and Collins 2002; DePaulo and Morris 2005; Koball et al. 2010).”
Social Relationships and Health: The Toxic Effects of Perceived Social Isolation. (2014, background): “…physical pain serves as a signal to draw attention and respond to threats or damage to one’s physical body, the feelings of loneliness serve as a figural signal to draw attention to and motivate responses to threats or damage to one’s social body (Cacioppo et al., 2013; Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009).”