Will being alone for a long time affect your social skills? See how many of these behaviors you meet

During the epidemic, many people have been quarantined at home, and the time they spend alone has increased significantly. Many people are bored. Some people joked that they feel like they can't "talk" anymore, and some people seem to feel that their ability and desire to socialize have weakened. But some people enjoy being alone...

What does being alone mean to a person? Will being alone for a long time affect a person's social ability?

The meaning of solitude varies from person to person

In the eyes of some people, being alone may be a symbol of loneliness, just as personality psychologist Berg described: being alone is the nature of introverts. It may be a way for people with social phobia to avoid social contact and reduce anxiety, or it may be an unintentional choice caused by social barriers.

Some people also believe that being alone is a necessary condition for self-reflection, which is more in line with another explanation of solitude by American psychologist Maslow. He believes that being alone can reflect a person's growth trajectory and help his development.

Therefore, some domestic scholars have given a more neutral definition to solitude: solitude is an inherent personality trait, which is a state in which an individual is in a state of clear consciousness without information and emotional communication with others. Based on this statement, the reasons and motivations behind solitude are divided into four different types:

01

Active solitude

For some people, being alone is not a forced decision, but an active choice. Even if they have good interpersonal relationships in their daily lives, they will spend some time with themselves, talk to themselves, and think about their personal lives, work or emotions in this way. In short, such people are not lonely, and being alone is their way to improve themselves.

02

Social avoidance

In contrast to those who actively spend time alone, those who truly have "social phobia" or "social anxiety" will choose to be alone in order to avoid social situations and reduce interactions with people. For them, being alone can greatly reduce the anxiety and panic caused by socializing. Obviously, being alone is not their active choice, but a passive decision caused by social avoidance.

03

Solitary

In most people's eyes, loneliness may be more "serious" than social avoidance. Many people with "social phobia" can gradually improve through some positive exercises, but loneliness is more like a personality trait or psychological quality. Because of this, it is difficult for lonely people to maintain normal relationships with others.

04

Lonely

As for loneliness, it is more of a subjective feeling. Loneliness is usually an unhappy experience, and the reason behind this is that the feeling brought by social interaction is lower than expected. Therefore, for lonely people, being alone is not happy and will not bring positive help, but bad social experience forces them to face solitude and loneliness.

From the perspective of others, active solitude may be the only way of being alone that can bring positive effects. In a survey of the solitary behavior scale conducted on normal people and people with mental illness, it was found that the normal people scored significantly higher in active solitude than the patient group, while the scores related to loneliness were just the opposite. For people with these two types of personality traits, being alone means their own active choice. But loneliness or social avoidance, on the other hand, are usually negative feelings that cannot be chosen.

How does being alone affect social skills?

It is not difficult to see that social skills and experience are one of the important reasons for solitary behavior, especially for people who are lonely or socially avoidant. But conversely, is it possible that long-term solitude may also affect people's social skills?

If a person is alone for a long time, the biggest difference from social situations may be that he can't see other people's faces or hear their voices, and these are based on human senses. Especially hearing, which may be affected by many aspects of solitude and change a person's social interaction.

Studies at the cellular level have shown that being alone can change the response characteristics of an animal's auditory neurons. Researchers used songbirds, or birds that sing, as research subjects and found that compared to birds that live in isolation, the neurons of birds that live in groups perceive sounds more accurately and selectively filter out some noise. Functional magnetic resonance imaging results of the brains of birds participating in the experiment also showed that birds with richer social status have stronger specific stimulation for sound information.

However, the above studies mainly focus on songbirds, while research on mammals, including humans, mainly focuses on other aspects. In studies using mice, it was found that social isolation measures such as solitude can affect the interaction between serotonin and the auditory system. By comparing the magnetic resonance imaging results of nine polar explorers before and after working at the Antarctic research station for 14 months, the researchers found that their brains had become smaller, especially the "C-shaped area" mainly involved in the formation of new memories - the "dentate gyrus of the hippocampus", which was reduced by an average of about 7%.

In addition to these physiological effects, being alone may have a greater impact on people's social habits and abilities at the psychological level. Being alone for a long time may make people feel "lonely", which may mean a decline in overall cognitive ability; the cognition of negative and depressive emotions increases, and the sensitivity to social threats also increases. Self-protection and self-contradictory thinking may make people more inclined to avoid social activities.

Back to the topic at the beginning, due to the impact of the new coronavirus, people's travel and activities are sometimes restricted, which invisibly increases the time for many people to be alone. How to actively treat and use this time alone may be a problem. Fortunately, the advancement of the Internet and various audio and video communication methods now allows people who are alone to meet their social needs online.

But if you are born to like being alone, or if you feel extremely lonely and miserable because of being alone for a long time, please be sure to seek some psychological counseling or medical advice.

Go out more often, interact with more people, and you will feel the beauty of the world.

author

Jing Zhang, PhD student in biomedical sciences at the Australian National University

References

1. Chen Xiaoli, Dai Xiaoyang, Bao Li, Wang Meng, Liu Meng. "Development of the Solitary Behavior Scale." Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology 01(2012):1-4.

2. George I., Alcaix S., Henry L., Richard J.-P., Cousillas H., Hausberger M. Neural correlates of experience-induced deficits in learned vocal communication. PLoS ONE. 2010;5:e14347. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0014347.

3. Keesom, Sarah M, and Laura M Hurley. “Silence, Solitude, and Serotonin: Neural Mechanisms Linking Hearing Loss and Social Isolation.” Brain sciences vol.10,6367.12Jun.2020, doi:10.3390/brainsci10060367.

4. Stahn, Alexander C et al. “Brain Changes in Response to Long Antarctic Expeditions.” The New England journal of medicine vol. 381,23 (2019): 2273-2275. doi:10.1056/NEJMc1904905.

5. Cacioppo, John T, and Louise C Hawkley. “Perceived social isolation and cognition.” Trends in cognitive sciences vol. 13,10 (2009): 447-54. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2009.06.005.

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