Loneliness & Memory Decline: Relationship Explained

What is your concept of loneliness? It's not about lacking human connection, you may feel lonely and isolated even though you are surrounded by a very large group of people physically, and this is due to the person's feeling of dissatisfaction with the quantity and quality of social connections in his life, according to a group of researchers.

Loneliness is inevitable from time to time, but how do feelings of isolation and negativity affect our memory? A group of researchers at the University of Barcelona, Spain conducted a study that included 1,537 people belonging to 3 groups, 2 from Sweden and Germany from the elderly and 1 from Denmark from adolescents with the aim of reaching a common factor between different countries and age groups.

This study came after many studies revealed that loneliness has wide-ranging effects on physical and mental health. In an attempt to find a satisfactory answer about the relationship between feeling social frustration and decline in verbal memory, these researchers conducted a set of surveys about social acceptance among participants and measured episodic memory skills using word recall tasks.

The results were different according to cultural differences, as the findings showed a strong relationship between the feeling of isolation and memory decline in the Swedish participants, while these problems did not appear in the German participants, and it is likely that the reason for this is due to the cultural difference and how people perceive and deal with social isolation.

The study concluded that there are no significant connections between any areas of the brain and loneliness after previous research presented hypotheses about the association of the "neurobiology" of loneliness with specific neural areas within the brain responsible for emotional processing and empathy.

The researchers conclude that the effect of loneliness on memory decline is influenced by the extent to which people tolerate social isolation which varies among countries and ages.

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