Influence of loneliness and social isolation on attention to social interactions

孤独和社会孤立对社交互动注意力的影响

• 批准号: ES/X007219/1
• 负责人: Ioana Raluca Mihai
• 金额: $ 10.73万
• 依托单位: Bangor University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FX007219%2F1
• 关键词: Influence; loneliness; social; isolation; attention

My PhD research explored the ability of human vision to be captured and held by observed social interactions, pre-adolescent childhood and young adults. With the help of eye-movements measurements while viewing naturalistic scenes depicting people having social interactions, my research investigated:1. Given that the social brain structures are not yet developed, are children and adults any different in the way they observe social information?2. Are children sensitive to the presence of a social interaction?3. Can social interactions "win" when they must compete for attention with other social information, such as single people?4. Are children and adults any different in how they recognise and define social interactions?5. Are there developmental changes in the way socially ambiguous scenes are viewed?Crucially, my research showed that children and adults are driven to attend to and look for social information in a very similar way, and their attention is similarly drawn to individuals engaged in social interactions. Two people interacting will hold our attention for longer, compared to when they are not interacting, and this is true for children as well. That young children already show this "bias" towards social interactions suggests social interactions must contain some valuable information for social learning, predicting social actions, and understanding other people's relationships and social decisions. Finally, we found that adults are more likely to consider an ambiguous social situation to be an interaction, compared to children, potentially reflecting some role of social experience in shaping our understanding of social scenes. One primary aim of the fellowship is to provide the time and space to finish publishing the findings from my PhD.Given the demonstrated value of social information as early as 6, and social interactions in particular, my work during the fellowship period is to investigate how social experience and social wellbeing may dynamically influence these processes. Perceived loneliness and social isolation can both have potentially harmful effects on the individual, at any age. Here I ask: does loneliness or social isolation change how an individual views social information? To answer this question, I plan to measure how the the size of our social network, and our level of loneliness relates to how we attend to social information, using the experimental methods and paradigms I developed throughout my PhD.My ultimate ambition here is to lay the theoretical foundation for further investigations looking at the influence of loneliness and social isolation on social attention across the lifespan, and especially in older adults. Loneliness research has the strong potential to impact on the wellbeing of many potentially isolated groups across the lifespan. Thus, across the fellowship, I will work with my mentors to expland my knowledge and training to support writing a funding application to expand this work to address similar questions in older age.More generally, this fellowship will allow me to communicate my PhD findings on the importance of social interactions and social information for cognitive and social development to a variety of audiences, academic and non. Considering that loneliness research is of particular intrest to aging groups, I will be liasing with charities and outreach organisations that support older adults, as well as presenting to older adults themselves to communicate findings and develop plans for future work with aging groups.

我的博士研究探索了通过观察社会互动来捕捉和掌握人类视觉的能力，包括青春期前的儿童和年轻人。在观看描绘人们进行社交活动的自然场景时，通过眼动测量，我的研究调查了：1.鉴于社交大脑结构尚未发育，儿童和成年人在观察社交信息的方式上有什么不同？2.儿童对社交活动的存在敏感吗？3.当社交互动必须与其他社交信息竞争时，他们能否赢得关注？4.儿童和成年人在识别和定义社交互动的方式上有什么不同吗？5.在看待社交模糊场景的方式上是否有发展变化？关键是，我的研究表明，儿童和成年人以非常相似的方式关注和寻找社交信息，他们的注意力也同样吸引到参与社交活动的个人身上。与他们不互动时相比，两个互动的人会让我们的注意力保持更长时间，儿童也是如此。幼儿已经表现出这种对社交互动的“偏见”，这表明社交互动必须包含一些对社交学习、预测社交行为以及理解其他人的关系和社交决策有价值的信息。最后，我们发现，与儿童相比，成年人更有可能将模棱两可的社会情景视为一种互动，这可能反映了社会经验在塑造我们对社会场景的理解方面的某些作用。该奖学金的一个主要目的是提供时间和空间来完成我的博士研究结果的发表。鉴于早在6岁就证明了社会信息的价值，特别是社会互动，我在奖学金期间的工作是调查社会经验和社会福祉如何动态地影响这些过程。感觉到的孤独和社会孤立在任何年龄都会对个人产生潜在的有害影响。在这里，我问：孤独或社会孤立是否会改变一个人对社会信息的看法？为了回答这个问题，我计划使用我在博士期间开发的实验方法和范例，来衡量我们社交网络的规模和我们的孤独程度与我们如何处理社交信息的关系。我的最终目标是为进一步研究孤独和社交孤立对一生中社会关注的影响奠定理论基础，尤其是在老年人中。孤独感研究有很大的潜力影响许多可能孤立的群体的一生的幸福。因此，在整个奖学金项目中，我将与我的导师合作，解释我的知识和培训，以支持撰写一份资金申请，以扩大这项工作，以解决老年人的类似问题。更广泛地说，这项奖学金将使我能够向不同的受众--学术和非学术受众--交流我的博士发现，即社交和社交信息对认知和社交发展的重要性。考虑到孤独感研究对老年群体特别感兴趣，我将与支持老年人的慈善机构和外展组织合作，并向老年人介绍自己，以交流发现并制定未来与老龄群体的工作计划。