62.2 Consequences of Isolation and Loneliness on Social Perception

Abstract

Background: Schizophrenia is characterized by social withdrawal, along with hallucinations and delusions of typically social and emotional nature. However, a causal relationship between these symptoms has not yet been determined. We hypothesized that in vulnerable individuals, prolonged social isolation could have detrimental effects on social perception and social cognition. Increased tendency for schizophrenia patients to falsely "detect" social meaning in randomness has been previously observed in biological motion (BM) perception studies using point light displays (Kim et al, 2011). Methods: To systematically test the potential effects of social isolation on misperception of social stimuli in the schizophrenia spectrum, we frst examined the effects of an acute (10 min) social isolation manipulation in healthy college populations by using the Cyberball game to induce a feeling of social exclusion, and examining their performance on a BM perception task in relation to schizotypy and subjective experience of loneliness. In a second study, we directly examined the relationship between loneliness, social isolation, and false detection of biological motion in random noise in patients with schizophrenia and age matched healthy adults. Results: Patients showed signifcantly increased levels of loneliness than healthy participants. In the college sample, we observed a signifcant reduction in social perception accuracy after just 10 minutes of social exclusion. However, in chronically lonely patient populations, biological motion task performance was impervious to acute manipulation of social exclusion. Strong associations were observed between greater levels of loneliness and positive symptoms in patients, and positive schizotypy in health partici-pants. Results from patient and healthy populations indicate a signifcant impact of distress via loneliness on accuracy, reaction time, and number of trials-to-criterion for BM detection. Conclusion: These results provide empirical support for the hypotheses, which posit that social or sensory deprivation may increase the likelihood of aberrant social perception. Moreover, in our sample, accuracy of social perception was adversely affected by chronic loneliness. In chronically lonely patients with schizophrenia, acute manipulations of exclusion had a limited impact on social perception, whereas in healthy participants, acute manipulation seems to have a much greater effect. Lastly, we found that subjective feeling of loneliness is more important than social isolation (e.g. quantity of social interaction) for aberrant social perception in schizophrenia spectrum participants. These fndings highlight the adverse impact of loneliness on psychopathology.