People who feel alone have this characteristic

Contrary to popular belief, there is a difference between being alone and feeling alone. “Loneliness is actually a state of mind,” explains Kendra Cherry, a specialist in psychosocial rehabilitation, for Very Well Mind. Loneliness makes people feel empty, alone and unwanted. People who feel lonely often crave human contact, but their state of mind makes it more difficult for them to connect with others. »

While it is good to sometimes be alone with yourself, solitude can have harmful consequences, particularly for mental health. Loneliness can have a bad influence on sleep, memory, learning, stress, increase the risk of depression or create fertile ground for risky behavior, such as alcohol or drug consumption.

When do we really feel alone?

“Loneliness is the aversive psychological experience that occurs when people perceive a lack of intimacy or connection in their social relationships,” write the researchers behind a study on loneliness and time spent alone every day. , published in December 2023 in the journal Journal of Research in Personality.

Loneliness is not necessarily linked to being alone. Feeling lonely can happen even when you spend a lot of time surrounded by other people while some people who spend a lot of time alone will not necessarily feel alone. However, the authors of this research revealed that after a certain amount of time spent alone, loneliness would inevitably be felt. During the experiment, the researchers found that participants spending at least 75% of their time alone all felt lonely.

Single people and the rest of the world

People who feel lonely don’t necessarily stand out when it comes to time spent alone. In a study published in Communications Psychologyresearchers have hypothesized that people who feel lonely form a mental representation of contemporary culture that deviates from that generally accepted in their social environment. This is why lonely people tend to perceive their ideas as not being shared by others, which is a characteristic feature of loneliness.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers conducted two experiments. The first, carried out with 80 people in total, aged on average 20 to 21 years old, aimed to have them undergo an MRI during which they had to complete a questionnaire asking them to evaluate their own traits, the traits of certain relatives, acquaintances and five famous celebrities (Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg). The researchers also asked them to rate their degree of closeness with each of the people evaluated and had them take an assessment of loneliness. During the second experiment, 923 participants took the same loneliness assessment, then had to indicate from a list of ten personalities which ones they knew. They were then asked to describe this celebrity in their own words, rate how close they felt to the celebrity, and the extent to which the celebrity possessed various psychological traits from a list presented. They were also asked if they felt their perceptions were in line with the Zeitgeist, or current school of thought.

Isolated representations

The first experiment showed that the neural representations of celebrities in participants who felt lonely diverged from those of the rest of the group. The second experiment revealed that texts written by lonelier people tended to be less similar to those written by other participants. Additionally, lonelier people were more likely to report that their perceptions of celebrities were inaccurate or not shared by those around them.

“Loneliness corresponds to idiosyncratic neural representations [inhabituelles, uniques] celebrities as well as more idiosyncratic communication about celebrities, particularly when there is a strong consensus among less solitary people,” the researchers write. As a result, people also feel alone in their way of thinking and perceiving things. They also tend to have divergent opinions on common topics.