John T Cacioppo

University of Chicago | UC · Department of Psychology and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience

Significance “Shelter in place” (SIP) orders have been deployed to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, but they induce social isolation that may paradoxically weaken antiviral immunity. We examined the impact of 2-wk SIP on immune cell population dynamics and gene regulation in 21 adult rhesus macaques, finding 30 to 50% declines in circulating immune c...

The sixth edition of the foundational reference on cognitive neuroscience, with entirely new material that covers the latest research, experimental approaches, and measurement methodologies. Each edition of this classic reference has proved to be a benchmark in the developing field of cognitive neuroscience. The sixth edition of The Cognitive Neuro...

Humans are social animals that experience intense suffering when they perceive a lack of social connection. Modern societies are experiencing an epidemic of loneliness. While the experience of loneliness is universally human, some people report experiencing greater loneliness than others. Loneliness is more strongly associated with mortality than o...

Exposure to a major traumatic stressor increases the odds of negative mental health and maladaptive behavioral outcomes not only for victims but also for 1st responders and health care professionals who are exposed to the aftermath. This study investigates the extent to which psychological resilience acts as either a Protective (i.e., vaccine-like)...

Loneliness is a negative and distressing emotional state that arises from a discrepancy between one's desired and achieved levels of social connectedness. The evolutionary theory of loneliness (ETL) posits that experiencing loneliness is an inherited adaptation that signals that salutary social relations are endangered or damaged and prompts people...

Anthropomorphism, the attribution of distinctively human mental characteristics to nonhuman animals and objects, illustrates the human propensity for extending social cognition beyond typical social targets. Yet, its processing components remain challenging to study because they are typically all engaged simultaneously. Across one pilot study and o...

A bstract Humans are social animals that experience intense suffering when they perceive a lack of social connection. Modern societies are experiencing an epidemic of loneliness. While the experience of loneliness is universally human, some people report experiencing greater loneliness than others. Loneliness is more strongly associated with mortal...

Loneliness is thought to serve as an adaptive signal indicating the need to repair or replace salutary social connections. Accordingly, loneliness may influence preferences for interpersonal distance. If loneliness simply motivates a desire to socially reconnect, then loneliness may be associated with a preference for smaller interpersonal distance...

Supporting information for the association between loneliness and interpersonal distance. Figure A. Odds ratios and associated 95% Wald confidence intervals (reported as “OR (5th percentile– 95th percentile)” for each predictor in the Study 2 replication of the final model obtained from step-wise selection in Study 1. Negative odds ratios indicate...

Loneliness is thought to serve as an adaptive signal indicating the need to repair or replace salutary social connections. Accordingly, loneliness may influence preferences for interpersonal distance. If loneliness simply motivates a desire to socially reconnect, then loneliness may be associated with a preference for smaller interpersonal distance...

Objective: Loneliness is an aversive response to a discrepancy between desired and actual social relationships and correlates with personality. We investigate the relationship of loneliness and personality in twin‐family and molecular genetic data. Method: Phenotypic correlations between loneliness and the Big Five personality traits were estimated...

SCIENTIFIC Representative longitudinal studies of older adults are important for identifying risk factors for adverse mental and physical health outcomes. The Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study (CHASRS) is a 10-wave longitudinal, population-based study of 229 Caucasians, African American, and Hispanic men and women who ranged from 50...

We describe the Cacioppo Evolutionary Theory of Loneliness (ETL) and its manifestations in contemporary society. The early conceptualizations of loneliness were as an individual difference characterizing a relatively small subset of the population. The ETL characterizes loneliness as not simply addressing an individual difference, but also as addre...

With the rise of online social networking, social relationships are increasingly developed and maintained in a digital domain. Drawing conclusions about the impact of the digital world on loneliness is difficult because there are contradictory findings, and cross-sectional studies dominate the literature, making causation difficult to establish. In...

Loneliness has been posited to increase the motivation to repair or replace deficient social relationships and, seemingly paradoxically, to increase the implicit motivation for self-preservation. In the current research, we report a cross-lagged panel analysis of 10 waves of longitudinal data (N = 229) on loneliness and self-centeredness (as gauged...

Persuasion, a prevalent form of social influence in humans, refers to an active attempt to change a person’s attitudes, beliefs, or behavior. There is a growing literature on the neural correlates of persuasion. As is often the case in an emerging literature, however, there are a number of questions, concerns, and alternative interpretations that c...

Loneliness has been shown to predict mental health problems and suicide in active duty soldiers. In the present study, we examined distal (e.g., demographic & socioeconomic characteristics) to proximal factors (e.g., platoon relations, relationship quality) that were associated with loneliness in active duty soldiers in the U.S. Army. Results revea...

Ebersole et al. (2016) aimed to conduct a direct replication of Cacioppo, Petty, and Morris (1983, Study 1) looking for a Need for Cognition X Argument Quality interaction on attitudes in response to a persuasive message. Although this effect has been replicated in the literature a good number of times, Ebersole et al. did not obtain it. We attribu...

Feeling lonely motivates people to reconnect with others, but it can also trigger a vicious cycle of cognitions and behaviors that reinforces their loneliness. In this study, we examined the behavioral consequences of loneliness in a virtual social environment. A total of 176 participants navigated a character (protagonist) through a two-dimensiona...

Socially situated thought and behaviour are pervasive and vitally important in human society. The social brain has become a focus of study for researchers in the neurosciences, psychology, biology and other areas of behavioural science, and it is becoming increasingly clear that social behaviour is heavily dependent on shared representations. Any s...

Perceived social isolation (PSI), colloquially known as loneliness, is associated with selectively altered attentional, cognitive, and affective processes in humans, but the neural mechanisms underlying these adjustments remain largely unexplored. Behavioral, eye tracking, and neuroimaging research has identified associations between PSI and implic...

Loneliness is a complex biological trait that has been associated with numerous negative health outcomes. The measurement and environmental determinants of loneliness are well understood, but its genetic basis is not. Previous studies have estimated the heritability of loneliness between 37-55% using twins and family-based approaches, and have expl...

Social exclusion has been defined broadly as the experience of being kept apart from others physically or emotionally. Our basic premise regarding the psychological study of social exclusion is that the brain is the key organ for forming, monitoring, maintaining, repairing, and replacing the salutary connections with others that Homo sapiens, as a...

. Skin conductance (SC), an autonomic arousal measure of the sympathetic nervous system, is a sensitive and useful index of physiological arousal. However, SC data does not always align with self-reports of arousal. SC, self-reported arousal, and their association, known as emotion coherence, may be altered with the presence of major psychiatric il...

We introduce a new analytic technique for the microsegmentation of high-density EEG to identify the discrete brain microstates evoked by the visual reversal checkerboard task. To test the sensitivity of the present analytic approach to differences in evoked brain microstates across experimental conditions, subjects were instructed to (a) passively...

The reliance on small samples and underpowered studies may undermine the replicability of scientific findings. Large sample sizes may be necessary to achieve adequate statistical power. Crowdsourcing sites such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) have been regarded as an economical means for achieving larger samples. Because MTurk participants may...

According to the differential reactivity hypothesis, lonely individuals respond differently to their environment compared to nonlonely individuals, which may sustain their loneliness levels. However, this interesting hypothesis has not yet been explored in daily life: Do lonely individuals feel lonely all the time, or do they feel more or less lone...

Cognitive and affective theory of mind (ToM) can be impaired in the course of neurodegenerative dementias. Experimental tests based on different task conditions and/or complexity may fail to capture disease-specific patterns of impairments. In this study, we assessed with a single task both the affective and the cognitive facets of ToM ability in a...

Introductory psychology (Intro Psych) is one of the most popular and frequently taught courses on college campuses, yet educators in psychology have limited knowledge about what is covered in classes around the nation or the extent to which class content reflects the current scope of the discipline. There is no explicit model to guide course conten...

The first Handbook of Psychophysiology was published more than four decades ago (Greenfield & Sternbach, 1972). Coverage in that Handbook emphasized the peripheral nervous system (PNS), an emphasis that many still identify with the term psychophysiology in accord with the history of psychophysiology. As is the case for physiological and other scien...

[T]he principal function of the nervous system is the coordinated innervation of the musculature. Its fundamental anatomical plan and working principles are understandable only on these terms. (Sperry, 1952, p. 297) We have a brain for one reason and one reason only - and that is to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason...

The Handbook of Psychophysiology has been the authoritative resource for more than a quarter of a century. Since the third edition was published a decade ago, the field of psychophysiological science has seen significant advances, both in traditional measures such as electroencephalography, event-related brain potentials, and cardiovascular assessm...

Social species are so characterized because they form organizations that extend beyond the individual. The goal of social neuroscience is to investigate the biological mechanisms that underlie these social structures, processes, and behaviors and the influences between social and neural structures and processes. Such an endeavor is challenging beca...

Significance Perceived social isolation (PSI) (loneliness) is linked to increased risk of chronic disease and mortality, and previous research has implicated up-regulated inflammation and down-regulated antiviral gene expression (the conserved transcriptional response to adversity; CTRA) as a potential mechanism for such effects. The present studie...

Background and objectives: This treatment study investigated the extent to which asymmetric dimensions of affective responding, specifically the positivity offset and the negativity bias, at pretreatment altered the rate of response to Behavioral Activation treatment for depression. Method: Forty-one depressed participants were enrolled into 16...

Prior research has suggested that loneliness is associated with an implicit hypervigilance to social threats-an assumption in line with the evolutionary model of loneliness that indicates feeling socially isolated (or on the social perimeter) leads to increased attention and surveillance of the social world and an unwitting focus on self-preservati...

Scholars from different disciplines have investigated the nature of love for centuries. It has been only in the past century that social psychologists have begun to scientifically investigate the complexity of love in comparison with other emotions (Hatfield & Rapson, 2009, for review). We laud Lamy (2016) for his thoughtful intentions to pursue th...

Being on the social perimeter is not only sad, it is dangerous. Our evolutionary model of the effects of perceived social isolation (loneliness) on the brain as well as a growing body of behavioral research suggests that loneliness promotes short-term self-preservation, including an increased implicit vigilance for social, in contrast to nonsocial,...

Can social resilience be trained? We report results of a double-dissociative randomized controlled study in which 48 Army platoons were randomly assigned to social resilience training (intervention condition) or cultural awareness training (active control group). The same surveys were administered to all platoons at baseline and after the completio...

The functional localization of negativity bias, an influential index of emotion information processing, has yet to be identified. Depressed (n = 47) and healthy participants (n = 58) completed a clinical interview for DSM-IV Axis I disorders, symptom checklists, a behavioral task to measure negativity bias, and viewed positive and negative images o...

In 1978, when the Task Panel report to the U.S. President’s Commission on Mental Health emphasized the importance of improving health care and easing the pain of those suffering from emotional distress syndromes including loneliness, few anticipated that this issue would still need to be addressed 40 years later. In 2011, a meta-analysis on the eff...

Loneliness typically refers to the feelings of distress and dysphoria resulting from a discrepancy between a person's desired and achieved levels of social relations, and there is now considerable evidence that loneliness is a risk factor for poor psychological and physical health. Loneliness has traditionally been conceptualized as a uniquely huma...

As a complex trait, loneliness is likely to be influenced by the interplay of numerous genetic and environmental factors. Studies in behavioral genetics indicate that loneliness has a sizable degree of heritability. Candidate-gene and gene-expression studies have pointed to several genes related to neurotransmitters and the immune system. The notio...

Prior research indicates that blacks and Hispanics/Latinos have flatter diurnal cortisol declines across the day, a profile associated with poorer health. The stability of racial and ethnic differences in cortisol levels over time is not well understood, and additional research is needed to establish racial and ethnic differences in psychosocial st...

Feeling lonely motivates people to reconnect with others, but it can also trigger a vicious cycle of cognitions and behaviors that reinforces their loneliness. In this study, we examined the behavioral consequences of loneliness in a virtual social environment. A total of 176 participants navigated a character (protagonist) through a two-dimensiona...

Social relationships endow health and fitness benefits, but considerable variation exists in the extent to which individuals form and maintain salutary social relationships. The mental and physical health effects of social bonds are more strongly related to perceived isolation (loneliness) than to objective social network characteristics. We sought...

Studying the way athletes predict actions of their peers during fast-ball sports, such as a tennis, has proved to be a valuable tool for increasing our knowledge of intention understanding. The working model in this area is that the anticipatory representations of others' behaviors require internal predictive models of actions formed from pre-estab...

Background: Since Berger's first EEG recordings in 1929, several techniques, initially developed for investigating periodic processes, have been applied to study non-periodic event-related brain state dynamics. New method: We provide a theoretical comparison of the two approaches and present a new suite of data-driven analytic tools for the spec...

Social isolation has been recognized as a major risk factor for morbidity and mortality in humans for more than a quarter century. The brain is the key organ of social connections and processes, however, and the same objective social relationship can be experienced as caring and protective or as exploitive and isolating. We review evidence that the...

The precise relationship between the autonomic nervous system and emotion has been a topic of intense debate and research throughout the history of modern psychology. The present article considers some of the more influential theoretical frameworks that continue to drive contemporary research on the relationship between emotion and physiological pr...

Social isolation has been recognized as a major risk factor for morbidity and mortality in humans for more than a quarter of a century. Although the focus of research has been on objective social roles and health behavior, the brain is the key organ for forming, monitoring, maintaining, repairing, and replacing salutary connections with others. Acc...

In two studies, participants reported what they had been thinking about while completing measures of subjective well-being (SWB). These thought reports were analyzed with respect to life domain, valence, and how strongly they were related to actual levels of SWB. Most people focused on their life circumstances (e.g., career) rather than on disposit...

Interpersonal synchrony is characterized by a temporary alignment of periodic behaviors with another person. This process requires that at least one of the two individuals monitors and adjusts their movements to maintain alignment with the other individual (the referent). Interestingly, recent research on interpersonal synchrony has found that peop...

Reading other people's eyes is a valuable skill during interpersonal interaction. Although a number of studies have investigated visual patterns in relation to the perceiver's interest, intentions, and goals, little is known about eye gaze when it comes to differentiating intentions to love from intentions to lust (sexual desire). To address this q...

Most mental disorders involve disruptions of normal social behavior. Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding the biological systems underlying social processes and behavior, and the influence of the social environment on biological processes, health and well-being. Research in this field has grown dramatically in...

There is an extensive literature on the negativity bias, including its conceptualization, measurement, temporal stability (individual differences), and neural and genetic associations. Hibbing et al. posit that the difference across individuals in the negativity bias is a key factor in determining political predisposition. The measures and paradigm...

Background Mid-frontal and mid-lateral (F3/F4 and F7/F8) EEG asymmetry has been associated with motivation and affect. We examined alpha EEG asymmetry in depressed and healthy participants before and after Behavioral Activation treatment for depression; examined the association between alpha EEG asymmetry and motivational systems and affect; and ev...

Supportive social relationships positively influence health, whereas negative relationships have an adverse effect. This preliminary experiment investigated the hypothesis that suppressing central oxytocin activity in male prairie voles would alter pair interactions, thereby inducing behavioral and cardiovascular changes in their associated female...

Using a nationally representative sample of 2,101 adults aged 50 years and over from the 2002 to 2008 waves of the Health and Retirement Study, we estimate the effect of loneliness (i.e., the absence of rewarding social relationships) at one point on mortality over the subsequent six years, and investigate social relationships, health behaviors, an...

Research in social epidemiology suggests that the absence of positive social relationships is a significant risk factor for broad-based morbidity and mortality. The nature of these social relationships and the mechanisms underlying this association are of increasing interest as the population gets older and the health care costs associated with chr...

DEFINITION OF LONELINESS Described in the scientific literature more than 30years ago, the feeling of being lonely is charac-terized as feeling socially isolated or on the social perimeter [3]. It is noteworthy that feeling lonely does not necessarily mean being physically alone. Loneliness corresponds to a discrepancy between the relationships one...

Prior research has shown that loneliness is associated with poorer self-regulation and may diminish the capacity for hedonic regulation. This study was implemented to determine the role of hedonic regulation in mediating the association between loneliness and self-rated health. A population-based sample (N = 229) aged 50 to 68 years was selected wi...

Social species are so characterized because they form organizations that extend beyond the individual; such structures evolved hand in hand with psychological, neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms. The goal of social neuroscience is to identify these biological mechanisms and to specify the influences between social and neural structu...

sc ientific american mind november/dec ember 2013 P eople often think of love and lust as polar opposites—love exalted as the binder of two souls, lust the transient devil on our shoul-ders, disturbing and disruptive. Now neuro-scientists are discovering that lust and love work togeth-er more closely than we think. Indeed, the strongest relationshi...

Social neuroscience emerged more than 20 years ago and has grown into a mature interdisciplinary scientific field. Research now provides compelling evidence that the structure and function of the nervous system are influenced by the social environment. Recent work in social genomics further underscores the importance of the social environment by de...

Robert Weiss (1973) conceptualised loneliness as perceived social isolation, which he described as a gnawing, chronic disease without redeeming features. On the scale of everyday life, it is understandable how something as personally aversive as loneliness could be regarded as a blight on human existence. However, evolutionary time and evolutionary...