Affective neuroscience of loneliness: Impacts on health and wellbeing

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Project Summary/Abstract. Loneliness is an all too familiar feeling for Americans, as an estimated 25-50% of the US population report feeling socially isolated, and social distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic threaten to sharply increase loneliness. Related to but distinct from relationship quality and frequency of social contact, loneliness is more than just an unpleasant subjective experience: it is associated with anxiety, depression, inflammation, heart disease, and an increase in mortality comparable to smoking. Loneliness is theorized to result in a specific biochemical cascade and affective disruptions (including increased sensitivity to threat and disrupted emotion regulation) that are adaptive in the short-term when experiencing lack of social contact, but maladaptive in the long-term. Because abnormal emotional responses can impair functioning and increase vulnerability to psychopathology and stress-related disorders, it is crucial to understand the psychological, affective, and neural processes that are linked with loneliness and associated negative health and wellbeing outcomes. The proposed research utilizes existing multimodal affective neuroscience data linked with biomarker of physical health and self-reports of wellbeing from the large, multi-project, publicly shared, longitudinal Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study to determine: when loneliness disrupts affective neural processing; what structural and functional neuroimaging differences are associated with loneliness; and how these neural differences negatively impact health and wellbeing. Specifically, the proposed research aims to: 1) use electroencephalographic (EEG) measures of emotional responding to investigate when the neural response to emotional stimuli differs with loneliness; 2) use multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to understand what anatomical and functional differences in the brain are associated with loneliness; and 3) investigate how loneliness related neural changes mediate known loneliness-associated negative health outcomes cross-sectionally and longitudinally. The proposed 3-year research and training plan will take place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, home to the MIDUS project and location where all neuroscience and health data to be analyzed was collected, supervised by sponsor Dr. Stacey Schaefer, co-sponsor Dr. Richard Davidson, and collaborator MRI biostatistician Dr. Jeanette Mumford, and includes detailed training in: multimodal neuroimaging data; crucial affective neuroscience theories; advanced data analytics; key data analysis software; additional skills needed to lead an independent research lab including grant-writing, mentorship, and responsible conduct of research. Overall, the proposed fellowship will: expand the neuroscientific understanding of loneliness; clarify the links between the brain and loneliness-associated health outcomes; suggest novel avenues for intervention to reduce the impacts of loneliness; and provide Dr. Anna Finley with exceptional postdoctoral training in affective neuroscience, health, and wellbeing.