Division of Medical Psychology, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Bonn, 53105, Bonn, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Haifa, 3498838, Israel.
Adv Sci (Weinh). 2021 Nov;8(21):e2102076. doi: 10.1002/advs.202102076. Epub 2021 Sep 20.
Loneliness is a painful condition associated with increased risk for premature mortality. The formation of new, positive social relationships can alleviate feelings of loneliness, but requires rapid trustworthiness decisions during initial encounters and it is still unclear how loneliness hinders interpersonal trust. Here, a multimodal approach including behavioral, psychophysiological, hormonal, and neuroimaging measurements is used to probe a trust-based mechanism underlying impaired social interactions in loneliness. Pre-stratified healthy individuals with high loneliness scores (n = 42 out of a screened sample of 3678 adults) show reduced oxytocinergic and affective responsiveness to a positive conversation, report less interpersonal trust, and prefer larger social distances compared to controls (n = 40). Moreover, lonely individuals are rated as less trustworthy compared to controls and identified by the blinded confederate better than chance. During initial trust decisions, lonely individuals exhibit attenuated limbic and striatal activation and blunted functional connectivity between the anterior insula and occipitoparietal regions, which correlates with the diminished affective responsiveness to the positive social interaction. This neural response pattern is not mediated by loneliness-associated psychological symptoms. Thus, the results indicate compromised integration of trust-related information as a shared neurobiological component in loneliness, yielding a reciprocally reinforced trust bias in social dyads.
孤独是一种痛苦的状态，与过早死亡的风险增加有关。形成新的、积极的社会关系可以减轻孤独感，但这需要在初次接触时迅速做出值得信赖的决策，而孤独如何阻碍人际信任仍不清楚。在这里，采用包括行为、心理生理、激素和神经影像学测量在内的多模态方法，探究孤独感下受损社交互动的基于信任的机制。预先分层的高孤独评分的健康个体（从 3678 名成年人的筛查样本中筛选出 42 名）与对照组（n=40）相比，表现出催产素能和情感反应对积极对话的减少，报告的人际信任度较低，并且更喜欢更大的社交距离。此外，与对照组相比，孤独个体被评为不太值得信赖，并且比盲目串通者更有机会被识别。在最初的信任决策中，孤独个体表现出边缘和纹状体激活的减弱，以及前岛叶和枕顶区域之间功能连接的减弱，这与积极社交互动的情感反应减弱有关。这种神经反应模式不受孤独相关心理症状的影响。因此，研究结果表明，在孤独感中，信任相关信息的整合受损是一个共同的神经生物学成分，导致社交对中互惠的信任偏见。
