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From: John Cacioppo To: Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacation@gmail.com> Subject: Re: New statistical technique Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:00:14 +0000 Attachments: SocialResilience.V111.doc; CHTproolpdf On 12/24/09 7:01 AM, "Jeffrey Epstein" <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote: thanks, I have recently been called many things,however, an extraordinary mathematician, was not one of them .. As you are aware , I am a devout science hobbyist, making no claims of expertise in any one field ( except money, not finance )- with that disclaimer in mind; I. Is loneliness of the individual a component of GROUP behavior. if so what is the action on the GROUP . ( the work seems dedicated solely to the singular, an early limitation in physics )Does it serve a beneficial goal. ie. does it take the least connected , out of the group, to reduce signalling noise. Does the lonely heart act as a scout or lookout for the group. being acutely aware of other groups. ( cheating searching , or just maybe bait - wounded prey ) My work focused initially on the individual because I sought to use loneliness as a window through which to view the evolutionary, neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic processes that underlie the emergent social structures — e.g., perceived connections with conspecifics — that characterize social species. What I saw through this window was a very different view of humankind. The last few chapters of our book begins to address this question, and the Framingham study I sent as an attachment last night (Cacioppo, Fowler, & Christakis, 2009) provides empirical evidence that loneliness — or its opposite, social connectedness/resilience — is also a group feature. This has led to our studying the differences in loneliness in proximal neighborhoods in south Chicago (an area of about 80 neighborhoods that are mostly low SES, African American, and crime-infested). We have found striking differences in loneliness in adjacent neighborhoods that cannot be explained in economic terms. We are investigating what the group-level features might be (where the "group" is defined as a neighborhood) that characterize these differences. This, in turn, has led to the attached paper, a version of which will appear in the American Psychologist. There is a vast literature from which one can draw reasonable hypotheses about what might be the actions of the group. Trust is one. The ability to go to a personal expense to punish cheaters ("punitive altruism") is a second. The constitution of the group such that only a small proportion of the members would try to cheat is a third. (If too high a proportion of the membership of a group pursue personal interests at the expense of the group's, the individuals acting on behalf of the group become the targets of punishment and exclusion, and the group becomes pretty toxic and difficult to sustain in the face of new problems and challenges.) Whether or not taking the least connected out of the group is beneficial depends on the constitution and maturity of the group. When starting a group, a "disconnected" individual can have good effects if he or she challenges the others to think more deeply and creatively about a problem. This is one of the roles I play when we put together new, large scientific teams as part of the Arete Initiative. If the disconnected individual is negative rather than provocative — a naysayer rather than a provocateur — then the research indicates that a healthy group will tire of the individual and after trying for awhile to accommodate the individual will reach a tipping point and reject the individual. Together, this suggests that there are patterns of subtle tensions among the elements in an aggregate that can produce synergies (i.e., high social yields for the individual inputs) or collapses (i.e., the group yield is less than the sum of the parts — which is not an attractive or healthy emergent organization). The phenomenon of loneliness, in the hands of the group, is used in the form of time out, shunning, ostracism, etc as a "stick", while its inverse is used in the form of recognition, appreciation, and affection as a "carrot" to increase the likelihood the elements (members) will contribute to the group goals. EFTA00766445 .2 do the deaf /blind exhibit more or less loneliness depression. Yes, disabilities generally increase the probability of loneliness. When Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf, was asked which disability affected her most, she is said to have replied that blindness separated her from things but deafness separated her from people. It is interesting in this context that there are communities of the deaf that are very cohesive and very hostile toward cochlear implant surgery to "correct" deafness because they regard deafness as a common, uniting feature rather than an error that needs to be corrected. There are no such communities of the blind of which I am aware. If true, this would be consistent with Helen Keller's insight. Deafness is particularly isolating, but a group of such individuals who share that common bond and have learned to communicate with each other can overcome the isolation of which she spoke by being especially motivated to form a strong, cohesive, exclusive community. As for your term, "loneliness depression," these constructs differ but loneliness leads to depression. Loneliness is not the only cause, but it is a major cause. I am attaching a five year cross-lag panel analysis to show some of the evidence for this statement. We have proposed an evolutionary hypothesis for this causal link. When cast out by a group, one is motivated to re-connect and, simultaneously, especially attentive to potential social threats. Pushing your way back into the group can be dangerous (trivially, think of what we do to a child who is given "time out" and who refuses to stand alone in their corner, now imagine this in an early hominid context and you can see how this could be a fatal behavioral strategy) but if the desire to connect leads to depression, then the individual is more likely to assume a depressed posture, show clear displays of sadness, and emit acoustic signals of sadness (e.g., crying) — all of which serve to call for attention and aid (i.e., connection) from anyone in the area who is willing to connect again with the individual. We can see this in children on a regular basis, and it generally is a safe and effective means of reconnecting by pulling others toward you rather than by pushing your way into the crowd. Of course, in evolutionary time, we spent much more time with the same small number of individuals. In contemporary society, our groups are much larger and more transient, so the signals that worked so well in evolutionary time are less effective and, therefore, can lead to chronic depression. 3. is the loneliness - depression -time dependent.. ( solitary prisoners after 2,4,10 months. ). I addressed this in part in the above, but I will add that we see affect become more depressive whether we experimentally manipulate loneliness or we look at natural perturbations in loneliness over years. The paper I sent last night showed that lowering loneliness has salubrious effects on depression over a two year period — a surprising finding to us all. 4 I would like to see the analogy to cell behavior. - if the cell is not surrounded or connected to similar kinds -it is programmed to commit suicide, would the cell be considered lonely if its "communication " were disrupted. Bacteria perform quorum sensing in that the individual cells will lay dormant until enough accumulate to have a fighting chance against the immune system. The communication across these cells enables the emergence of a superorganismal entity — which we call an infection but to the bacteria is the expression of the function it evolved to serve. In the absence of quorum sensing, communication across these cells, this evolutionary function would be haphazard at best and lost to extinction at worst. (We may rue infection when we are the host but it would be difficult for life as we know it were bacteria not performing their evolved function.) You are getting at the reason I proposed social neuroscience to begin with. A strictly biological approach might understand development and behavior to stem from evolved anatomical structures and genetic programs that operate within living cells, isolated from the social world, and the brain to be a solitary biological machine. Indeed, from the perspective of many biological scientists during most of the 20th century, the contributions of the social world to behavior could be considered later, if at all. Accordingly, social factors were viewed as being of minimal interest with respect to the basic development, structure, or processes of the brain. To the extent that social factors were suspected of being relevant, their consideration would so complicate the study of brain and behavior that they were not a priority. The approach of social scientists throughout most of the 20th century was no less focused than that of biologists. World EFTA00766446 wars, a great depression, and civil injustices made it amply clear that social and cultural forces were too important to address to await the full explication of cellular and molecular mechanisms. As a consequence, biological events and processes were routinely ignored. The notion that nervous, endocrine, and immune systems operate outside the reach of sociocultural influences had advantages, to be sure. This approach allowed focused study of isolated anatomical systems with a resulting specification of component structures and processes. When you move from asocial to social species, especially social species with small liter sizes and long periods of utter dependency, social factors contribute importantly to the basic structures and processes of the organism. Eric Kandel sought to identify the neurobiology of learning by studying the isolated sea slug. However, operant conditioning — a form of learning — has a different underlying neurobiology depending on whether the sea slug is studied in isolation or in the presence of other sea slugs. In humans, the complexities of our social structures are thought to have contributed to the expansion of the neocortex and the dramatic increase in neural interconnectivity and synaptic complexity. (Yes, contrary to original thinking, synapses differ across species with the amount and complexity of the information exchange increasing as one goes up the phylogenetic tree.) Like I said, viewing our species through the window of loneliness has not only changed our understanding of loneliness (e.g., we view it as a biological rather than clinical construct), but it has changed our view of who we are as a species. All the best, John On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 7:31PM, John Cacioppo wrote: Jeffrey, I remembered that you are an extraordinary mathematician, so I thought the attached might be of interest. It is as much about a new statistical technique as it is about loneliness. All the best, John EFTA00766447