Not Only the Lonely: Loneliness May Be Contagious

A new study has found that loneliness may be spread from one person to another within a community or social network

By Dena Afrasiabi

Can you catch loneliness in much the same way you can catch the common cold? A new research study suggests that loneliness may be contagious. Lonely people can drag each other down over the long term, making each other even lonelier. While lonely people will often stick together in order to feel less lonely (think of the outcasts in high school who hung together), their loneliness often causes them to push each other farther to the outskirts of their social circles. The study was authored by John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, who worked alongside Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University and John Fowler of UC San Diego, who studied earlier data they collected as part of the Framingham Heart Study

The researchers followed the children of the original Framingham participants beginning in 1983 and asked them to fill out three questionnaires, one every two years, about how often they felt lonely. The results of the study showed that the close friends and family of those who felt lonely were about 52% more likely to feel lonely, themselves. Cacioppo believes that a lonely person spreads loneliness to others through feelings of negativity and mistrust. "People who feel lonely view the social world as more threatening," Cacioppo said, "They may not be aware they are doing it, but lonely individuals think negatively about other people. So if you are my friend and I treat you negatively, then over time we would stop being friends. But in the meantime, our interactions caused you to treat people less positively, so you're likely to lose friends, and they in turn are likely to lose friends. That appears to be the transmission of loneliness."

Contrary to popular belief, loneliness is not just the result of isolation. According to the researchers, it's often the opposite. A person becomes more lonely as the result of negative social interactions, not from avoiding social situations. This suggests that the best way to treat loneliness may not be through individual therapy but by lookin at the community as a whole and making sure that the community or social network does a good job of keeping its members connected to each other.