Abstract
Loneliness is broadly described as a negative emotional response resulting from the differences between the actual and desired social relations of an individual, which is related to the neural responses in connection with social and emotional stimuli. Prior research has discovered that some neural regions play a role in loneliness. However, little is known about the differences among individuals in loneliness and the relationship of those differences to differences in neural networks. The current study aimed to investigate individual differences in perceived loneliness related to the causal interactions between resting-state networks (RSNs), including the dorsal attentional network (DAN), the ventral attentional network (VAN), the affective network (AfN) and the visual network (VN). Using conditional granger causal analysis of resting-state fMRI data, we revealed that the weaker causal flow from DAN to VAN is related to higher loneliness scores, and the decreased causal flow from AfN to VN is also related to higher loneliness scores. Our results clearly support the hypothesis that there is a connection between loneliness and neural networks. It is envisaged that neural network features could play a key role in characterizing the loneliness of an individual.
Highlights
One of the basic needs of humans is to enjoy a sense of belonging in social groups [1]
Evidence from ventral attentional network (VAN) studies suggested that the presence of at least a third of distinctive brain circuit-cognitive processes were involved in responding to external stimuli [19] or to internal representations [59]. In consistent with these early observations, our results revealed that the causal information flows from affective network (AfN) to both VAN and visual network (VN) occurred in both groups, indicating that attention may be driven by task-related information, which is neither salient nor goal-directed control
We have explored the relationships between loneliness scores and the possible effective connectivity between resting-state networks (RSNs), i.e. dorsal attentional network (DAN), VAN, AfN and VN
Summary
One of the basic needs of humans is to enjoy a sense of belonging in social groups [1]. From an evolutionary point of view, humans engaging with social groups can benefit from shared resources and security because social isolation is more likely to lead to serious challenges in survival. If a discrepancy occurs between expected social relations and actual social relations, people could feel loneliness, which is generally defined as a negative emotional response to the experience of this discrepancy [2]. Maintaining stable social (interaction) relationships (a stable social network) evolved into an adaptive goal, which influenced human’s behavior, cognition and emotion [3,4,5].
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