Loneliness

Dimensions of Human Connection: People, Pets, and Prayers

John T. Cacioppo, Ph.D. — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:50:45 +0000

Sociality is at the heart of human existence, a fact that has been acknowledged as far back as Aristotle. Alfred Adler and Rudolf Dreikurs were among the first in the twentieth century to develop theoretical perspectives on the topic, but only in the last half-century has sociality been subject to vigorous theoretical and empirical study. According to Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, relational and belonging needs are superseded in importance only by survival and safety needs. Harry Harlow's study of infant rhesus monkeys did not deny the importance of survival needs (i.e, food), but showed that social contact is just as important for healthy growth and development. Prompted by Konrad Lorenz's studies of imprinting and the plight of infants and young children in Britain's post-World War II orphanages, John Bowlby (1973) showed that in humans, too, maternal-child attachment bonds are essential for healthy growth and development. Across the lifespan, affiliative and attachment bonds have clear survival and reproductive advantages that may help explain why the motivation to form and maintain close social bonds is as potent as the drive to satisfy hunger or thirst. Just as hunger and thirst motivate the search for food and water, the pain of unmet social needs (i.e., felt social isolation) motivates a search for social reconnection. The desire for connection is so irrepressible that people imagine relationships with important social others, or indulge in "social snacks" (e.g., photos of loved ones) and surrogates (e.g., parasocial attachments to television characters).

In earlier work, Louise Hawkley and I have found that mental representations of feelings of social connectedness are multi-faceted. Quantitative analyses have revealed three dimensions along which people feel socially connected, and this structure was evident in young as well as middle-age adults and was the same across ethnicities. The first dimension, which we termed Intimate Connectedness, reflects satisfaction of the social self at a deeply personal level, and was uniquely associated with marital status. Relational Connectedness reflects satisfaction of close friendship needs and was uniquely associated with frequency of contact with close friends and relatives. Collective Connectedness reflects satisfaction of the need to belong to a meaningful group and was uniquely associated with number of memberships in voluntary groups. These findings represented the first installment in our research on the ways people connect with others.

We recently explored the phenomenon that people form and maintain social connections with non-human beings. Pets and religious entities, for instance, are commonly considered sources of security and belonging. Religious deities are potent attachment figures for many individuals, and the quality of the relationship with God appears particularly important in satisfying connection needs. Using data from the General Social Survey, others have found that closeness in a "divine relationship" is associated with significantly greater global happiness, life satisfaction, and even marital happiness. Church attendance was also associated with global and marital happiness, but a close divine relationship continued to predict higher scores on each of the well-being measures when church attendance was held constant. In addition, among married individuals, a close divine relationship buffered the negative effect on marital satisfaction of having few social interactions outside of the marriage, implying that divine relationships compensate for shortcomings in one's social relationships. On the other hand, married and unmarried individuals did not differ in the strength of the observed association between a close relationship to God and overall well-being, suggesting that divine relationships may not substitute but can supplement existing social relationships to enhance life satisfaction. Lending further support to this conjecture was the finding that a close relationship with God (i.e., a secure attachment) is associated with less loneliness, even when the social support of close others is held constant. In addition, strengthening of one's religious beliefs, particularly beliefs in a close, personal God, has been shown to ease the burden of bereavement, divorce, and singlehood.

Just as the quality of interpersonal relationships influences the degree of felt belonging or loneliness, the quality of the human-pet relationship appears to moderate the experience of security and belonging afforded pet owners. For example, simply owning a pet did not predict subjective well-being in a sample of elderly women, but the degree to which these women were attached to their pets was associated with their reported happiness. Similarly, pet attachment, but not pet ownership, was negatively associated with depressive symptoms in a large national sample of older adults.

A number of studies, including some of our own, have shown that anthropomorphism of, and attachment to, a pet is greater in individuals who lack supportive interpersonal relationships. In a study of older adult pet owners, pet attachment bonds were stronger among those with higher feelings of loneliness and stress, and lonely individuals who lacked a close human friend formed the strongest pet attachments. In a study of cat owners, attachment to a pet cat was greater among those with fewer people in the household, fewer social support providers, and poorer perceived quality of social support provision. Among women, the reported companionship and support provided by a cat was greater among childless women than among women who were pregnant or already had children. In a large survey of pet owners and non-owners, attachment to a pet was greater among childless couples than parents, and greater among never-married, divorced, widowed, and re-married individuals than those in a first marriage. These studies suggest that pets supplement or substitute for human connections to satisfy connection needs. In support of a substitution role for pets, attachment to a pet was associated with less depression among bereaved individuals, but only among those with few supportive confidants.

The versatility with which humans access diverse sources of relationship opportunities suggests that relationship satisfaction is more than just satisfaction with human connections but involves an overall sense of connectedness that encompasses a wide array of relationship domains. It is in our nature to want to be close to and valued by others consistently over time. Given the importance of this aspect of our being, one might weigh this factor in the many rational decisions we make on a daily basis that affects our life trajectories. This knowledge might also affect how we communicate with one another. Criticism is more easily heard when couched within a positive context that signals the flaws are not fatal to the relationship, but rather are simply correctable glitches in an otherwise healthy and mutually beneficial relationship.

Epidemic of Loneliness

John T. Cacioppo, Ph.D. — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:33:04 +0000

It is what we say we value more than anything else. In surveys to determine the factors that contribute most to human happiness, respondents consistently rate connection to friends and family-love, intimacy, social affiliation-above wealth or fame, even above physical health.

This should come as no great surprise. We are social animals, descended from a common ancestor that gave rise to all the other social primates. It may well be that the need to send and receive, interpret and relay increasingly complex social cues is what drove the evolution of our expanded cerebral cortex-the reasoning part of the brain. After all, it is our ability to think, to pursue long-term objectives, and to form bonds and act collectively that allowed us to emerge as the planet's dominant species. Certainly, there is no other physical attribute-size, strength, speed, eyesight, smell, hearing-that accounts for our success.

Despite their genuine, human desire to connect, millions of people are predisposed to undermine social connection. Despite their best efforts, they alienate rather than engage others. And yet these people are no more or less attractive than anyone else, and their problem is not lack of social skill.

Obviously, objective circumstances-the new kid at school who doesn't know anyone, the elderly widow who has outlived her contemporaries-can make meaningful connection more of a challenge.

And yet it is possible, for instance, to be miserably lonely inside a marriage, a situation that resonates in fiction from Flaubert to Jackie Collins.

It is possible-in fact, it is highly likely-to feel lonely in a bustling corporate office. Talent, financial success, fame, even adoration, offers no protection from the subjective experience. Janis Joplin, who was as shy and withdrawn off stage as she was raucous and explosive on, said shortly before her death that she was working on a tune called, "I just made love to 25,000 people, but I'm going home alone." Three of the most idolized women of the twentieth century, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana, were famously lonely people. And yet a fourth, Gretta Garbo, was famous for saying "I vant to be alone." Which serves to remind us that there is nothing inherently problematic about solitude in and of itself. Loneliness isn't about being alone, it's about not feeling connected.

The need for connection, and the enforcement power of withdrawing that connection, is evident even among chimpanzees. In chimp society, as in every human culture ever studied, infractions against the social order are punished by some form of ostracism. Well along the path of cultural development, banishment remained the most severe stricture, short of torture or death, imposed by kings and potentates. Even today, in modern correctional institutions, the penalty of last resort is solitary confinement.

In the past few years, laboratory research has examined the power of our need for contact with others and has, in fact, mapped its physiological roots. Cooperation, for example, activates the "reward" areas of the brain, much as those areas are activated by the satisfaction of hunger. When we confront social rejection, the experience activates the same areas that light up when we are subjected to physical pain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging shows that when we see unfamiliar human beings, or even pictures of human beings, our brains respond in a distinctly different way than they do when we see any other type of object. "Someone like me" is clearly a very important category in our neural wiring. Empathy, too, is traceable: images of humans displaying intense emotions, rather than neutral affect, register in the brain with correspondingly greater intensity. And more significant for where our story will take us, recent studies demonstrate that the social environment can actually modulate RNA transcription, influencing the way cells replicate. Social context also affects immune function.

Despite all the persuasive evidence of our need for connection, and the clear demonstration of the influence of connection on our physiology, there is today a worldwide epidemic of disconnection that until now has been regarded as little different than a personal weakness or a distressing state with no redeeming features. Recent studies have found these notions to be wrong.

To call it an epidemic of loneliness risks having it relegated to the advice columns. Say the word "lonely" and people think dating services, "Miss Lonelihearts," "Only the Lonely," or Los Lonely Boys. But there is nothing trivial, or comical, or poignantly romantic about loneliness. What has emerged is the notion that loneliness is an aversive signal whose purpose is to motivate us to reconnect. But over time if it is not addressed, loneliness can contribute to generalized morbidity and mortality.

Marriage is an imprecise marker of social connection, but the age-adjusted death rate for people who have never been married is 65.9 percent higher than for those who have been married at some time in their lives. Compared to those who are currently married, the age-adjusted death rate for those who never marry is 220 percent higher. Married couples tend also to be less lonely. When one also considers loneliness, much of the health protective effects of marriage disappear.

A generation ago, depression was poorly understood, woefully under diagnosed (it still is) and all too readily dismissed as moodiness or weakness. Most saw it as a character flaw rather than an as an illness.

Now we know that depression is a medical condition with physical manifestations in the brain, that it is to some extent genetic, and that it costs an estimated $44 billion in lost productivity each year for the U.S. economy. Neglected in that impersonal statistic, of course, is a vast amount of human suffering and unfulfilled human potential.

Loneliness is far more than a social misfortune, it is a significant problem of health and happiness that is distinct from but contributes to the likelihood of depression. In a forthcoming blog, we'll examine the relationship between loneliness and depression more closely.

Selfish Genes, Social Brains

John T. Cacioppo, Ph.D. — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 12:09:27 +0000

Genes which promote behaviors that increase the odds of the genes surviving are perpetuated. One implication of this simple insight is that evolution concerns the competition between genes using individuals as their temporary vehicles as well as the competition between species. It also means that the genetic constitution of Homo sapiens derives not solely from an individual's reproductive success but from the success of one's children to reproduce. Hunter/gatherers who did not form social connections and did not feel a compulsion to return to share their food or defense with their offspring may have been more likely to survive to procreate again, but given the long period of abject dependency of human infants their offspring may have been less likely to survive to procreate. The result is a selection pressure for the development of information processing operations that could contribute to the formation and maintenance of social connections, including attachment, synchrony, communication, compassion, empathy, social connection, mindreading, deception and the detection of deceit, cooperation, group formation, benevolence, and altruistic punishment - that is, a social brain.

It is the gene that is obligatorily selfish, not the human brain. Humans create emergent organizations beyond the individual - structures that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilizations, and international alliances. These superorganismal structures evolved hand in hand with genetic, neural, and hormonal mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped humans survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too survived to reproduce. The striking development of and increased connectivity within the cerebral cortex, especially the frontal and temporal regions, are among the key evolutionary developments in this regard. The cerebral cortex is a mantle of between 2.6 to 16 billion neurons with each neuron receiving 10,000 to 100,000 synapses in their dendritic trees. The expansion of the frontal regions in the human brain contribute to the human capacities for reasoning, planning, performing mental simulations, theory of mind, and thinking about self and others. The temporal regions, in turn, are involved aspects of social perception, memory, and communication. The means for guiding behavior through the environment emerged prior to neocortical expansion. The evolutionarily older systems also play a role in human information processing and behavior albeit in a more rigid and stereotyped fashion. The intricately interconnected neocortical regions of the frontal lobes are involved in self control, which permits the modulation of these older systems and the overriding of organismal hedonistic impulses for the benefit of others.

Evidence across human history provides overwhelming support for the supposition that humans are fundamentally social creatures. The average person in contemporary times has been estimated to spend nearly 80% of waking hours in the company of others, most of which is spent in small talk with known individuals. These estimates have been supported in more detailed assessment by Danny Kahneman and colleagues using the day reconstruction method to determine how people spend their time and how they experienced events in their lives on a daily basis. The results of these daily assessments indicated people spend only 3.4 hrs alone, or approximately 20% of their waking hours. The time spent with friends, relatives, spouse, children, clients, and coworkers is rated on average as more inherently rewarding than the time spent alone. Respondents indicated that their most enjoyable activities were intimate relations and socializing - activities that promote bonding and high quality relationships, whereas their least enjoyable activities were commuting and working. These results are consistent with survey data. When asked "what is necessary for happiness?" the majority of respondents rate "relationships with family and friends" as most important, although we certainly do not always act like this is most important.

It is surprisingly easy to overlook the evident and, consequently, to live our lives in nonoptimal ways.

On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 departed from New York's LaGuardia Airport for Charlotte, North Carolina when it struck a flock of geese during takeoff. Both engines were disabled, and the heavy aircraft quickly lost the lift it needed to stay aloft. Capt. Sully Sullenberger, who was piloting the plane that day, somehow managed a controlled descent into the Hudson River. The media dubbed the ditching of the plane and the survival of all 155 passengers and crew the miracle on the Hudson, and Capt. Sullenberger was duly heralded as a hero. The ability to control the descent of an 84 ton plane without engine thrust is not something with which humans are naturally endowed. Capt. Sullenberger was not a novice, of course. He was a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate who flew F-4 fighter planes while in the Air Force and had 40 years of flight experience. However, as remarkable as were his achievement relative to what one might normally expect in this situation, Capt. Sullenberger's efforts were not sufficient for the miracle on the Hudson to be achieved.

When Flight 1549 came to a stop in the frigid Hudson River, the passengers and crew scrambled to the wings and inflatable slides of their slowly sinking aircraft. Local commercial vessels from the New York Waterway and Circle Line fleets responded almost immediately, with the first of the vessels reaching the plane within four minutes. The crews of the various vessels worked together to rescue the passengers and crew of Flight 1549, and various volunteers and agencies offered medical assistance. These rescue efforts were not motivated by personal or commercial self-interests, and none were lauded as heroes. Their efforts received less attention because their actions were precisely what we expect of one another.

It is the unusual, not the commonplace, that gets attention. On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese parked near her home in Kew Gardens, New York and proceeded to her residence in a small apartment complex. Winston Moseley, a business machine operator who later confessed that his motive was simply to kill a woman, overtook Genovese and stabbed her twice in the back. Genovese screamed, "Oh my God, he stabbed me! Help me!", a call that was heard by neighbors. When one neighbor shouted at the attacker, "Leave that girl alone," Moseley ran away. Genovese, who was wounded and bleeding, moved toward the apartment building slowly and alone. Moseley returned approximately 10 minutes later and searched for Genovese. Finding her nearly unconscious in a hallway of the building, he continued his knife attack on her and sexually assaulted her. The entire attack unfolded over about half an hour, and yet no one responded. The first clear call for help to the police did not occur until minutes following the final attack, and Genovese died in an ambulance en route to the hospital. The number of people who were aware of some aspect of the attack was estimated to be from a dozen to more than three dozen. One unidentified neighbor who saw part of the attack was quoted in a New York Times article as saying "I didn't want to get involved." The notion that people might not go to the aid of another, even a stranger, in dire need led to public outrage. Decades of research led to the conclusion that the ambiguity of the situation and the diffusion of responsibility were contributing factors.

These two news stories illustrate, in very different ways, how invisible forces sculpted by evolution and cultivated by environment act on our species. When commercial captains act against their own financial interests to rescue others on a sinking aircraft, we think nothing of it because we believe it is what any individual in the same situation would naturally do. When observers of a brutal attack do nothing to aid the victim, we are horrified because we believe it goes against who we are as a species. The notion that "what is good for me is good for society" has been a mainstay in economics for the past four decades, but economics has it wrong. Humans are not motivated solely by self interests but rather we work together and help one another when in need. We survive and prosper in the long run through collective concerns and actions, not by solely selfish pursuits.

The Good, The Bad, and The Society

John T. Cacioppo, Ph.D. — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:49:37 +0000

This past year, Chicagoans have heard the uplifting rhetoric of now-President Obama at Grant Park in November and the surrealistic explanations of now-impeached Governor Blagojevich for his alleged attempts to sell gubernatorial appointments. These contrasting episodes of idealism and corruption represent the broad scope of human nature, which, according to new findings in brain and behavioral science, includes not only the impulse to pursue narrowly defined self-interest, but also an impulse to serve social concerns greater than the self.

In recent years, society has all but relegated the pursuit of the collective interest to the world "as it ought to be," a pursuit given lip service at religious services, political rallies, and during half time at sporting events as coaches try to motivate their teams. Meanwhile, we have grown to accept self-interest as the only force that really matters in "the world as it is," the hard-nosed world of making a living and paying the bills, and of running a political machine. The thought that, outside their own immediate families, people are motivated by anything other than ambition and greed is considered naïve. To see the world as fundamentally Machiavellian is considered rational and realistic.

The problem with these assumptions is not only that they are simplistic and misleading, but that by accepting them as factual, we perpetuate a tyranny of low expectations, and we fail to employ other levers for human advancement that are at our disposal.

The behavioral and brain sciences, combined with the interpretive findings from primatology and anthropology, demonstrate that homo sapiens is an obligatorially gregarious species, meaning that we have always lived in social structures in which our survival and the survival of our offspring (and, thus, our genes) are heavily dependent on others. According to the "social brain hypothesis," the driving force behind the evolution of enhanced intelligence was the need to manage the intricate social bonds that kept us alive. The line of hominids that led to us branched off on its own distinctive path as much as seven million years ago. During 99.9 percent of that vast expanse of time, the interest of the individual and the interest of the family or tribe were so tightly intertwined as to be almost indistinguishable.

Even if a brutal egoist could survive for a while at the expense of those around him, without a healthy and sustainable framework of social bonds to protect them, rarely if ever would his heirs live long enough to reproduce. Thus the genes that survived as part of our biological heritage are heavily biased toward the formation and attentive maintenance of human attachments. That is evidenced by how social context "gets under our skin" in profound ways: Loneliness, for instance, can alter the DNA transcription in your immune cells. The emotional restraint in your partner that causes his or her blood pressure to increase may increase your own blood pressure as well.

All animals must self regulate their internal physiology to stay alive. As obligatorially gregarious hominids, we also co-regulate each other, not just physiologically, but through myriad means such as the establishment and enforcement of social norms. The crimes of which Governor Blagojevich is accused, like the recent excesses that led to the collapse of Wall Street, represent not just a failure of ethical watchdogs or federal regulators, but also the failure of society's individual agents-you and me-to enforce higher standards.

Families and tribes have always wielded the power of guilt, shame, ostracism, reproach, and other expressions of social disapproval. As a result, they have always been blessed or burdened with the behaviors they accept as the norm.

All civilizations have informal and formal systems to promote social over selfish-interests, including taboos, moral codes, and laws. As in the Broken Windows theory of policing, small infractions matter because they set a negative tone that cascades into more negative behavior in more and more people. If it seems okay to throw trash here, more people will throw trash. If we think everyone cheats on his or her taxes, we are more likely to cheat. If, on the other hand, we think everyone is paying his or her fair share, we are more likely to pay what we owe. Controlled studies show that when we experience helpfulness, we immediately become more helpful. The same kinds of studies show that when we are primed to think about money, we become less helpful, and we try to distance ourselves from others.

The world of politicians, like the world of Wall Street bankers and Fortune 500 CEOs, exists as a separate tribe that establishes and maintains its own norms. Yet each of these tribes is part of the larger tribe of society at large, which also has the ability to enforce norms through social approval or social disapprobation. When President Obama speaks of changing Washington, he is speaking about changing the norms under which our elected politicians operate. When he speaks of changing Washington, he is speaking to us as much as he is speaking to his political colleagues because achieving this change requires the collective support of us all.

Greed can never be justified, either from the school of "rational self interest" that drives some aspects of Neoclassical economics, or from the "they're all a bunch of crooks" school that simply abdicates responsibility and looks the other way. Top down efforts to constrain self-interested behavior-legal sanctions and moral codes-can only do so much. Any such efforts to improve human behavior need to be complemented by bottom up efforts: it lies in what we as individuals envy, accept, expect, sanction, and celebrate.

-John Cacioppo and Bill Patrick

Easing Your Way Out of Loneliness

John T. Cacioppo, Ph.D. — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:36:21 +0000

What can be done to escape the grips of loneliness? In Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, we suggest four simple steps, captured in the acronym EASE, for dealing with chronic loneliness. Some of what follows may seem obvious, but it is also obvious that "birds of a feather flock together" and that "opposites attract." Although both statements may be self-evident, they are internally inconsistent and therefore both cannot be true. This is what is so problematic about self-evident truths about the mind - we have a variety of ready-made labels for things after the fact, but these labels often do not predict or explain anything about howthe mind actually works. The real test is whether these work for you when you are resolve to give EASE an honest try.

E is for Extend Yourself. The withdrawal and passivity associated with loneliness are motivated by the perception of being threatened. To be able to test other ways of behaving without that feeling of danger, you need a safe place to experiment, and you need to start small. Don't focus on trying to find the love of your life or to reinvent yourself all at once. Just slip a toe in the water. Play with the idea of trying to get small doses of the positive sensations that come from positive social interactions.

To improve your odds of eliciting a positive reaction-and to reduce your odds of being disappointed-you may want to confine your experimental outreach to the somewhat safer confines of charitable activities. Volunteer at a shelter or a hospice, teach elders how to usecomputers, tutor children, read to the blind, or help with a kids' sports team.You will not necessarily receive gratitude and praise for your good deeds-that's not what you're after-but it is also unlikely that you will receive scathing social punishment. There will be no big scene of fulfillment in which you are at long last voted football captain or prom queen, nor will you immediately fall into a relationship with a movie star. But you may begin to feel the positive sensations that can reinforce your desire to change, while building your confidence, while improving your ability to self-regulate. Even "small talk" about sports or the weather, when it is welcomed and shared, can be a co-regulating, calming device, and the positive change it can bring to our body chemistry can help us get beyond the fearful outlook that holds us back.

A is for Action Plan. Some people view themselves as adrift on agenetic and environmental raft over whose course they have no control. The simple realizations that we are not passive victims, that we do have some control, and that we can change our situation by changing our thoughts, expectations, and behaviors toward others can have a surprisingly empowering effect, especially on our conscious effort to self-regulate. A second inkling of control comes from recognizing that we have latitude in choosing where to invest our social energy. It does not take an enormous change to alter one's course and destination dramatically.

Charitable activities enable us to put ourselves in the social picture with less fear of rejection or abuse, but even here somed iscretion is in order. Coaching kids' soccer requires a least a little knowledge of the game, but being manager or assistant coach often requires nothing more than a willingness to show up and pass around the Gatorade and the orange slices. Trying out for the community theater production could be awkward unless you really have acting or singing talent, but the theater group might welcome you with open arms if you volunteered to help backstage or in the ticket office. If you're shy with people but love animals, volunteer at an animal shelter. The animals will welcome you immediately. When you feel ready to reach out more to the humans around you, you can safely assume that theother volunteers share your interest in animal welfare, which gives you a natural basis for conversation, perhaps even connection.

Feeling lonely also make us fall victim to our own eagerness to please. Social connection does not involve superhuman strength. Committing to doing too many things for too many people in an effort to open ourselves to connection can instead make us feel overworked, stressed out, and faltering. The whole point is to be merely human-available to the common bond of humanity. Nor does anyone say that you have to become a long-suffering saint. Instead, the most adaptive model is an openness to engagement combined with realistic expectations, accurate perception of social cues-including cues that suggest caution-and realism about the type and number of commitments to take on. That may sound like a lot to manage, but when our executive brain is not distressed by feelings of isolation and threat, it is up to the task.

S is for Selection. The solution to loneliness is not quantity but quality of relationships. Human connections have to be meaningful and satisfying for each of the people involved, and not according to some external measure. Moreover, relationships are necessarily mutual and require fairly similar levels of intimacy and intensity on both sides. Even casual chitchat needs to proceed at a pace that is comfortable for everyone. Coming on too strong, oblivious to the other person's response, is the quickest way to push someone away. So part of selection is sensing which prospective relationships are promising, and which would be climbing the wrong tree. Loneliness makes us very attentive to social signals. The trick is to be sufficiently calm and "in the moment" to interpret those signals accurately.

In the same fashion, we all need to learn that being drawn to someone's physical appearance or status is not a good basis for a deep connection. Compatibility and sustainability depend far more on such things as common beliefs, attitudes, interests, and activities. When it comes to dating and marital success, the data show that similarity ("birds of a feather flock together") trumps complementarity ("opposites attract").

Deciding how to search for birds of your own feather requires selection as well. For those who tend to be more quiet than talkative, finding someone who is also comfortable with silent companionship may be a good idea. Enthusiastic readers, especially shy readers, are more likely to find people to connect with at an author's appearance at a bookstore, or by working in a literacy program, than by going to a dance club. How you should go about trying to meet people depends on what kind of people you want to meet.

E is for Expect the Best. Social contentment can help us to be more consistent, generous, and resilient. It can make us more optimistic, and that "expect the best" attitude helps us project the best. Warmth and goodwill on one person's part is more likely to elicit warmth and goodwill from other people-such is the power of reciprocity. With practice, any of us one can "warmup" what we present to the world. We have more control over our thoughts and behavior patterns than we may think, but then again, no one can exercise total control of interpersonal relationships, any more than we can force an immediate and complete turnaround in the way others see us. While we wait for the change in us to register in the world around us, fear and frustration can push us back into the critical and demanding behavior associated with loneliness. This is when patiently focusing on the small physiochemical rewards of reaching out to feed others can help keep us on track.

The need for patience does not end once we begin to find greater happiness in our relationships. Even if any of us were perfect, inevitably the other people we come to know will have different perspectives. The prototypical wedding vows, "for better or for worse, in good times and in bad," are a public proclamation of the ever-present likelihood of interpersonal friction. Even the best friends and the partners in the best marriages will disagree and hurt each other from time to time. Success in the face of this reality is served by not magnifying the moments of friction by over-interpreting them.

This holiday season, exercise a little patience and ease your way into healthy connections with others.

What Is Our Fundamental Nature?

John T. Cacioppo, Ph.D. — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:12:38 +0000

What is our fundamental human nature? To address this question, biological, behavioral, and cognitive scientists in the 20th century tended to focus on single organisms, organs, cells, intracellular processes, and genes. From the perspective of many scientists during the 20th century, the contributions of the social world to behavior were thought best to be considered later, if at all. Social factors were thought to be of minimal interest with respect to the basic development, structure, or processes of the brain and behavior. To the extent that social factors were suspected of being relevant, their consideration was thought to be so complicated that they should be considered at some later date.

Further fueling this focus on the solitary individual in scientific analyses was the dominant metaphor of the mind - the isolated desktop computer. Complete with input, processing, long and short term memory stores, and output stages, the brain was thought to be analogous to the hardware and the mind to software. Culture in this context was like the computer operating system -Mac or PC.

How things had changed by the dawn of the 21st century. If you had a computer that was connected only to the electrical outlet, you would not have a very powerful computer. To understand computers today, one has to appreciate their capabilities as a connected collective. Culture, in this context, is not so much about the operating system in a solitary computer as it is in the norms, conventions, and practices that have evolved to promote the effective connection and interaction among a set of computers.

Whereas computers have been connected on the order of years, hominoids have been mobile and broadband connected for hundreds of thousands of years. We like to think of ourselves as individualists, but we are fundamentally social organisms. We are born to the most prolonged period of abject dependency of any mammal, and for our species to survive, human infants must instantly engage their parents in protective behavior, and the parents must care enough about their offspring to nurture and protect them. Even once grown we are no match in a one-on-one contest against a cougar or wolf much less a lion, tiger, shark, or rogue elephant. Our major evolutionary advantage is our brain and ability to communicate, remember, plan, and work together. Our survival depends on our collective abilities, not our individual might. Teamwork meant not only that increasing numbers of children might survive, but that these creatures could afford to be more developmentally and behaviorally complex. Greater behavioral latitude led to greater diversity, which led to innovation, which led to more rapid cultural learning.

The social nature of the human species is not simply an add-on, either. It has fundamentally shaped the evolution of our biological design, including the rapid increase in neocortical connectivity and intelligence. According to Robyn Dunbar and colleagues' social brain hypothesis, deducing better ways to find food, avoid perils, and navigate territories has adaptive value for large mammals, but the complexities of these ecological demands pale by comparison to the complexities of social living. Among the demands of social living are learning by social observation; recognizing the shifting status of friends and foes; anticipating and coordinating efforts between two or more individuals; using language to communicate, reason, teach, and deceive others; orchestrating relationships, ranging from pair bonds and families to friends, bands, and coalitions; navigating complex social hierarchies, social norms and cultural developments; subjugating self-interests to the interests of the pair bond or social group in exchange for the possibility of long term benefits; recruiting support to sanction individuals who violate group norms; and doing all this across time frames that stretch from the distant past to multiple possible futures. Cross-species comparisons suggest that the evolution of large and metabolically expensive brains is more closely associated with social than ecological complexity.

Humans create and depend on emergent organizations beyond the individual- structures ranging from dyads and families to institutions and cultures. These emergent structures evolved hand in hand with genetic, neural and hormonal mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced. These higher organizations have long been apparent, but we are beginning to understand their neural, hormonal, and genetic substrates and consequences. Investigations of these social structures and biological substrates, and the interplay between the two, form the basis of an interdisciplinary field that two decades ago Gary Berntson and I termed "social neuroscience." I will have more to say about this field, and about our fundamental social nature, in future blogs. In the meantime, I would appreciate hearing what you think.