Loneliness can spread
Research has shown people who feel lonely spread that feeling to others.
A team of boffins used data from a large-scale survey of health conditions for more than 60 years to show lonely people share their loneliness.
And over time, a group of lonesomes will move to the fringes of social networks.
This movement leads billy-no-mates to losing the few ties they have left. It's all rather sad, I find.
But before relationships are severed, people on the periphery transmit feelings of loneliness to their remaining friends, who also become lonely.
Another disturbing side to being on your own is that it is associated with a variety of mental and physical diseases that can shorten life.
The team of scientists found next-door neighbors in the survey who experienced an increase of one day of loneliness a week prompted an increase in loneliness among their neighbors who were their close friends.
The loneliness spread as the neighbors spent less time together.
Previous work suggested women rely on emotional support more than men do, and in this study women were more likely than men to report "catching" loneliness from others.
People's chances of becoming lonely were more likely to be caused by changes in friendship networks than changes in family networks.
Research also shows that as people become lonely, they become less trustful of others, and a cycle develops that makes it harder for them to form friendships.
Societies seem to develop a natural tendency to shed these lonely people, something that is mirrored in tests of monkeys, who tend to drive off members of their groups who have been removed from a colony and then reintroduced.
Weird Science Factoid: By feeding hens certain dyes they can be made to lay eggs with multi-coloured yolks. Groovy!
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
