A generalizable neural signature of perceived loneliness

Social interactions are fundamental to human well-being. Conversely, loneliness is related to poorer sleep, heightened depression, and increased mortality. Much of what people invest time, energy, and money in revolves around connecting with others. However, identifying the factors that make people feel connected or disconnected can be challenging due to individual differences in how loneliness is experienced. Studying the neural mechanisms that reflect how satisfied or lonely people feel offers a new window into this critical problem and allows us to test whether there exists a robust brain signature of loneliness. Loneliness may be associated with widespread changes in brain connectivity across multiple neural regions and systems. Here, we aim to capture this complexity by deriving a neural signature of loneliness from distributed brain patterns in resting-state functional connectivity data in the Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset. We then demonstrated the generalizability of this neural signature in predicting individual differences in loneliness in an independent sample of young adult students