Word: likelies
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 with more serious psychological ills like depression, sleep dysfunction, high blood pressure and even an increased risk of dementia in older...
...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, an ongoing trial originally begun in 1948 to identify risk factors for cardiovascular disease...
...results were illuminating: If one person reported feeling lonely at one evaluation, his closest connections (either family or close friends) were 52% more likely to also report feeling lonely two years later. The effect was strongest among those in close relationships, 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...
...other words, loneliness is not so much a symptom of being companionless as it is a driving force behind social isolation. Rather than simply reflecting the emotional state of one person, Cacioppo says, loneliness is more like an indicator of the social health of our species on the whole - a temperature reading, if you will, of how well- or not so well-integrated we are as a population...
...nature, a social species; we feed off our interactions with one another and thrive when we are inspired, challenged and supported by one another. While occasional feelings of isolation are perfectly natural and normal, the new study suggests that loneliness can begin to fester in a society like a cancer if it is allowed to transmit unchecked from one person to another...