The film Her is set in a near-future city and tells the story of Theodore, a man who makes his living writing intimate, heartfelt letters on behalf of others — for their lovers and their families. Adrift as he faces the end of a marriage, he buys the latest voice-controlled computer system and encounters an artificial intelligence (AI) — Samantha — and gradually falls in love. The film captures the way our lives and technology have come to overlap, prompting deeper reflection — but more importantly, it raises the theme of loneliness.
What is loneliness?
Many people assume loneliness has to do with objectively lacking friends or lacking social skills; yet, according to research by J. T. Cacioppo and S. Cacioppo (2018), these summary characteristics are not always accurate. Loneliness is the distinct experience of perceiving oneself, even in a bustling crowd, as socially isolated and socially rejected. Because loneliness (perceived isolation) and social isolation (an objective lack of social contact) are two different constructs, today different users transferring to MeWe or Signal will each have very different feelings about their follower counts — some can feel lonely amid a flood of message notifications, while others can feel perfectly at ease with only "Me" and no "We".
Is loneliness a kind of pain?
"Sometimes I think I have felt everything I'm ever going to feel. And from here on out, I'm not gonna feel anything new — just lesser versions of what I've already felt." Beyond Her, a great deal of literature describes loneliness as a kind of heartache, even as a hollow, empty feeling. And there is a scientific basis for all of this! According to research by Perini and colleagues (2018), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has shown the regions of the brain activated by the social pain felt during rejection: the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the higher-order secondary somatosensory cortex, and other parts of the pain matrix are activated in the same way as when we perceive physical pain. Of course, inferring mental activity from observed neural activity (a process known as reverse inference) is difficult (Poldrack, 2006), and at present there is considerable debate over whether activation of the brain's pain-related regions actually means people endure suffering equal to physical pain when facing social rejection, or whether other factors are at play: for example, these regions are also involved in processing negative emotions (Fellows & Farah, 2005) or play an important role in detecting cognitive conflict (Botvinick, Cohen, & Carter, 2004). Although physical pain and social pain are not necessarily cut from the same cloth, both bring us distress and torment (Eisenberger, 2015).
How does loneliness affect my social behaviour?
Research by Düzel and colleagues (2019) has shown that people who feel lonely more readily tend to have less gray matter in the left cerebellum, the left amygdala and the left posterior parahippocampus gyrus. These regions are responsible for social processing and affective processing, which allow us to read other people's motives and the mood of a crowd accurately, so with less gray matter, a lonely person may find it harder to process social information and emotions well. On top of this, a lonely person's brain stays on heightened alert for social threat, and lonely people tend to view their surroundings as full of threat and harshness (Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2014). For this reason, prolonged loneliness not only makes people feel anxious and afraid of receiving negative evaluation, but can also prompt people to be more aloof towards others (Cacioppo, Hawkley, Ernst, Burleson, Berntson, Nouriani, & Spiegel, 2006). Like the lonely Theodore in the film: because things with his wife were already over, his solitary state led him to close himself off even further, and before meeting Samantha he had been stubbornly refusing on his own to sign the divorce papers and turning down invitations from friends, passing the months of being stuck endlessly in dreary days as he was hounded by the divorce lawyer.
The negative effects of loneliness
As described above, although the pain that loneliness brings and physical pain are different in how they are perceived, social pain too can make people grieve and suffer, and an increase in social pain will raise the threshold at which people define something as painful and their tolerance for it (Dewall & Baumeister, 2006). For this reason, people who have just experienced social rejection will see their sensitivity to emotion drop along with their sensitivity to social pain, so that the emotional system briefly struggles to function normally (Vangelisti, 2009). Lonely people are not only insensitive to their own emotions, but also insensitive to the emotional pain felt by others, making it hard for them to understand the reasons behind other people's emotional reactions and hard to anticipate the emotions that situations will stir in others (Vangelisti, 2009), forming a state of emotional numbness. On top of this, because loneliness makes people more aloof, it may lead them to focus more on protecting themselves and their own needs in environments they define as negative (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009a), so for them, feeling empathy with others is a difficult thing (DeWall & Baumeister, 2006). And yet, people have a need to belong, and when it is hard to understand others, this need is harder to satisfy; an unmet need to belong is a major factor in people having suicidal thoughts and suffering from depression. Beyond its psychological effects, loneliness also damages the brain's cognition and executive functioning, increases vascular resistance affecting health, and reduces the amount of deep sleep (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009b); for this reason, loneliness, like other emotions, affects human health on both a physical and a psychological level.
Conclusion
Even though loneliness brings humankind many negative effects, it has also served a powerful purpose in survival: in increasing reproduction, it can promote the transmission of genes within the gene pool — this feeling acts as a signal that drives people to maintain the connections they rely on for survival and self-improvement (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009a). Humans are social, group-living animals, and when we have a sense of belonging, the social pain and social threat we feel will fade away with it, letting us live in the present moment of connection with others (Vangelisti, 2009). We trust that amid social rifts, fluctuating temperatures and the ravages of the pandemic — when limits on gatherings and lockdowns also make it harder to be with friends, and people can hardly avoid feeling lonely — we can still make the attempt to find joy within the hardship: holding Zoom-meeting parties and using social media well both help ease people's loneliness, and when we feel a sense of belonging, it lowers feelings of depression and our wariness towards those around us (Vangelisti, 2009). These days may well be a struggle, so all the more we need to stay connected with other people, whether by taking part in a community group or by confiding in close friends; may you, supported by one another, once again feel the joy of being alive. As Samantha replies to Theodore: "I've seen you feel joy. I've seen you marvel at things. Maybe you're not feeling it right now, but that's okay — you've gone through a lot recently, you've lost a part of yourself. But at least your feelings are real."
Reproduced from The Psychology Society, Social Sciences Students' Society, HKUSU. The content and/or title may have been edited. Original link: https://instagram.com/p/CKtki2wh5ii/
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