When a group describes the same star, most people use fairly similar words. However, American researchers have shown that, among a certain profile of participants, the reactions of brain and the choice of words clearly deviate from this norm. Two studies published in the journal Communications Psychology combined brain imaging and text analysis with 80 fMRI volunteers and 923 adults recruited online.
This profile is the lonely peopleassessed with the UCLA Loneliness Scale. Timothy W. Broom’s team observed that these participants construct mental representations of celebrities and talk about them in a much more unusual way than others. This shift affects both the cortex préfrontal médiana key area of the “social brain”, and the language that they use. The study provides new insight into this very intimate feeling: having the impression that “no one sees the world like me”.
Loneliness, brain and celebrities: what the study shows
In the first study, 80 young adults aged approximately 20 to 21 were placed in a functional MRI scanner. They had to judge personality traits for themselves, loved ones, acquaintances and five well-known celebrities: Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. The researchers compared, in the medial prefrontal cortex, the similarity of neuronal responses between participants during this task.
People who reported being lonelier presented activation profiles that were much less similar to those of the rest of the group when they thought about celebrities. In other words, their brain “codes” Justin Bieber or Kim Kardashian in a more unique way, while less solitary participants show a strong neural consensus, especially for Justin Bieber. This result suggests a mental representation of popular culture that deviates from the average.
Words that also deviate from common speech
The second study, conducted online with 923 adults with an average age of 40, found the same pattern in language. Each participant chose a familiar celebrity from a list, then described them “like a friend”. The texts were analyzed using the Google Universal Sentence Encoder model, which measures semantic similarity between descriptions.
The writings of more solitary people were overall less similar to those of others, a sign of a more idiosyncratic way of talking about celebrities. These participants also more often declared the impression that their vision of the stars was not shared by those around them, which corresponds to the very heart of the definition of felt loneliness.
When “shared reality” cracks
The authors summarize this mechanism by explaining: “Shared reality promotes social connections between people and strengthens confidence in one’s knowledge because it is corroborated by others. Our results provide evidence that loneliness is associated with deviations from the zeitgeist, particularly when it comes to perceptions of well-known celebrities”, summarize Timothy W. Broom and his colleagues, cited by PsyPost. Other work on the medial prefrontal cortex had already linked loneliness and a feeling of disconnect in the way of representing others.
Along the same lines, the researchers add: “Loneliness corresponded to idiosyncratic neural representations of celebrities, as well as more idiosyncratic communication about celebrities, particularly when an otherwise strong consensus existed among less lonely people. solitary people that their ideas are not shared by the people around them is more than a metaphor; it is reflected objectively in an idiosyncratic knowledge of contemporary culture that deviates from the consensus.” The study focuses mainly on the chronic loneliness and does not yet say whether this shift also appears during passing phases.
