Word: cacioppo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...give us a clue as to why. Although we tend to think of it as a self-contained emotional state - a condition that affects people individually, either by circumstance or by dint of an antisocial personality - researchers now say that loneliness is more far-reaching than that. John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, believes it is a social phenomenon that exists within a society and can spread through it, from person to person, like a disease. And while everyone feels lonely once in a while, for some it becomes a persistent condition, one that has been associated...
...Cacioppo's latest study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, he partnered with leading social-network scientists Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, who make up the team best known for its series of studies showing that emotional states and behaviors - including happiness, obesity and quitting smoking - can propagate like a wave throughout a network of people. To examine whether the contagion effect existed with loneliness, the researchers used the same data set that Christakis and Fowler had mined for their earlier studies - the Framingham Heart Study...
...Cacioppo and his team focused on the children of the original Framingham cohort, which included more than 5,200 middle-aged men and women. Starting in 1983, more than 4,500 volunteers were asked to fill out three questionnaires, spaced two years apart, about how many days in the previous week they had felt lonely. Because most of the participants' friends and family members were also part of the Framingham study, the scientists could track, over time, whether one person's report of loneliness had any impact on the feelings of isolation in other members in his or her social...
...waning as the connections became more distant, but remained significant up to three degrees of separation - in other words, one lonely person could influence whether his friend's friend's friend felt lonely. "Loneliness has been conceived in the past as depression, introversion, shyness or poor social skills," says Cacioppo. "Those turn out not to be right. Research we and others have done suggests that it really is a fundamental human motivational state very much like hunger, thirst or pain...