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      White matter structures associated with loneliness in young adults

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          Abstract

          Lonely individuals may exhibit dysfunction, particularly with respect to social empathy and self-efficacy. White matter (WM) structures related to loneliness have not yet been identified. We investigated the association between regional WM density (rWMD) using the UCLA Loneliness Scale in 776 healthy young students aged 18–27 years old. Loneliness scores were negatively correlated with rWMD in eight clusters: the bilateral inferior parietal lobule (IPL), right anterior insula (AI), posterior temporoparietal junction (pTPJ), left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), and rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (RLPFC). The bilateral IPL, right AI, left pSTS, pTPJ, and RLPFC were strongly associated with Empathy Quotient (EQ), whereas the bilateral IPL, right AI, left pTPJ, and dmPFC were associated with General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSES) score. The neural correlates of loneliness comprise widespread reduction in WMD in areas related to self- and social cognition as well as areas associated with empathy and self-efficacy.

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          The social neuroscience of empathy.

          The phenomenon of empathy entails the ability to share the affective experiences of others. In recent years social neuroscience made considerable progress in revealing the mechanisms that enable a person to feel what another is feeling. The present review provides an in-depth and critical discussion of these findings. Consistent evidence shows that sharing the emotions of others is associated with activation in neural structures that are also active during the first-hand experience of that emotion. Part of the neural activation shared between self- and other-related experiences seems to be rather automatically activated. However, recent studies also show that empathy is a highly flexible phenomenon, and that vicarious responses are malleable with respect to a number of factors--such as contextual appraisal, the interpersonal relationship between empathizer and other, or the perspective adopted during observation of the other. Future investigations are needed to provide more detailed insights into these factors and their neural underpinnings. Questions such as whether individual differences in empathy can be explained by stable personality traits, whether we can train ourselves to be more empathic, and how empathy relates to prosocial behavior are of utmost relevance for both science and society.
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            Social cognition in humans.

            We review a diversity of studies of human social interaction and highlight the importance of social signals. We also discuss recent findings from social cognitive neuroscience that explore the brain basis of the capacity for processing social signals. These signals enable us to learn about the world from others, to learn about other people, and to create a shared social world. Social signals can be processed automatically by the receiver and may be unconsciously emitted by the sender. These signals are non-verbal and are responsible for social learning in the first year of life. Social signals can also be processed consciously and this allows automatic processing to be modulated and overruled. Evidence for this higher-level social processing is abundant from about 18 months of age in humans, while evidence is sparse for non-human animals. We suggest that deliberate social signalling requires reflective awareness of ourselves and awareness of the effect of the signals on others. Similarly, the appropriate reception of such signals depends on the ability to take another person's point of view. This ability is critical to reputation management, as this depends on monitoring how our own actions are perceived by others. We speculate that the development of these high level social signalling systems goes hand in hand with the development of consciousness.
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              Social isolation.

              Social species, by definition, form organizations that extend beyond the individual. These structures evolved hand in hand with behavioral, neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced. Social isolation represents a lens through which to investigate these behavioral, neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms. Evidence from human and nonhuman animal studies indicates that isolation heightens sensitivity to social threats (predator evasion) and motivates the renewal of social connections. The effects of perceived isolation in humans share much in common with the effects of experimental manipulations of isolation in nonhuman social species: increased tonic sympathetic tonus and HPA activation; and decreased inflammatory control, immunity, sleep salubrity, and expression of genes regulating glucocorticoid responses. Together, these effects contribute to higher rates of morbidity and mortality in older adults. © 2011 New York Academy of Sciences.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group
                2045-2322
                20 November 2015
                2015
                : 5
                : 17001
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Psychiatry, Tohoku Pharmaceutical University , Sendai, Japan
                [2 ]Department of Functional Brain Imaging, Institute of Development, Ageing and Cancer, Tohoku University , Sendai, Japan
                [3 ]Division of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute of Development, Ageing and Cancer, Tohoku University , Sendai, Japan
                [4 ]Division of Medical Neuroimaging Analysis, Department of Community Medical Supports, Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization, Tohoku University , Sendai, Japan
                [5 ]Department of Nuclear Medicine and Radiology, Institute of Development, Ageing and Cancer, Tohoku University , Sendai, Japan
                [6 ]Human and Social Response Research Division, International Research Institute of Disaster Science, Tohoku University , Sendai, Japan
                [7 ]Smart Ageing International Research Center, Institute of Development, Ageing and Cancer, Tohoku University , Sendai, Japan
                [8 ]Department of Adult Mental Health, National Institute of Mental Health, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Kodaira , Tokyo, Japan
                [9 ]Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of General Systems Studies, The University of Tokyo
                [10 ]Department of Psychiatry, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine , Sendai, Japan
                [11 ]Japan Society for the Promotion of Science , Tokyo, Japan
                [12 ]Faculty of Medicine, Tohoku University , Sendai, Japan
                Author notes
                Article
                srep17001
                10.1038/srep17001
                4653806
                26585372
                61842f8a-91c5-441d-9e70-16712f90a20b
                Copyright © 2015, Macmillan Publishers Limited

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

                History
                : 10 May 2015
                : 22 October 2015
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