Loneliness as a modulator of intersubject neural alignment across social and nonsocial contexts

Loneliness modulates intersubject neural synchrony in Human Connectome Project movie-watching fMRI (n = 178), increasing idiosyncratic responses in social and nonsocial contexts.

• Why it matters: Loneliness is linked to cognitive biases, but how it changes shared brain responses across people during social versus nonsocial information is unclear.
• What they did: Using intersubject correlation analyses on high-resolution movie-watching fMRI (n = 178), the study compared neural synchrony patterns for lonely versus non-lonely individuals across social and nonsocial contexts.
• The result: Lonely individuals showed more idiosyncratic responses in default mode network, visual association cortex, and amygdala during social contexts, and in reward-related circuitry during nonsocial contexts, while also showing greater synchrony in nucleus accumbens (social) and somatomotor regions (nonsocial).

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