Article Synopsis
- Researchers used brain imaging to study how isolation affects people's desire for social interaction after they experienced either fasting or social isolation for 10 hours.
- Participants reported feeling lonely and craved social engagement after isolation, showing different neural responses to social cues compared to food cues after fasting.
- The findings suggest that both social isolation and fasting create specific cravings in the brain, indicating that acute social deprivation leads to a heightened desire for social connection, much like hunger from fasting.
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Article Abstract
When people are forced to be isolated from each other, do they crave social interactions? To address this question, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural responses evoked by food and social cues after participants (n = 40) experienced 10 h of mandated fasting or total social isolation. After isolation, people felt lonely and craved social interaction. Midbrain regions showed selective activation to food cues after fasting and to social cues after isolation; these responses were correlated with self-reported craving. By contrast, striatal and cortical regions differentiated between craving food and craving social interaction. Across deprivation sessions, we found that deprivation narrows and focuses the brain's motivational responses to the deprived target. Our results support the intuitive idea that acute isolation causes social craving, similar to the way fasting causes hunger.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8580014 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41593-020-00742-z | DOI Listing |
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