Loneliness and Adolescents’ Neural Processing of Self, Friends, and Teachers: Consequences for the School Self‐Concept

Abstract

The present interdisciplinary study explored whether perceived loneliness is associated with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) activation during self- and social judgments (friends and teachers) in adolescents. Moreover, we examined how vMPFC activity is related to the academic self-concept (ASC). Results of manifest path analysis indicated that high perceived loneliness was related to lower neural response to self-judgments. In turn, high neural response to self-judgments was positively associated with the ASC, whereas there was a trendwise negative association between high neural response to teacher-related judgments and ASC. This study reveals associations between perceived loneliness and neural processing of the self, underlining the idea that feeling isolated from others may hinder self-insight and, by extension, the formation of a stable academic self-concept.

Neurobiology of loneliness: a systematic review

“…Twenty-four studies focused on younger adults (mean age 18–60; [ 24 – 47 ]), 12 on older adults (mean age >60; [ 48 – 59 ]), two on adolescents [ 60 , 61 ], and two across the lifespan [ 62 , 63 ]. Most reports included healthy individuals while seven focused on clinical populations: four with depression [ 47 , 49 , 51 , 57 ], and one each with traumatic brain injury (TBI) [ 58 ], schizophrenia [ 28 ], and severe hearing impairment [ 27 ].…”

“…Eighteen reports analyzed the relationship between loneliness and brain function or connectivity using fMRI. Ten of these studies were task-based ( n = 10; [ 24 , 25 , 28 , 34 , 44 , 45 , 51 , 60 , 62 , 63 ]), and two were resting-state fMRI ( n = 8; [ 37 , 39 – 43 , 47 , 49 ]) (Table 2 ). One report appears in both Tables 1 and 2 [ 63 ]…”

“…—Used different types of social images compared to Cacioppo et al [ 25 ]. Golde et al Germany [ 60 ] 41 adolescent students 15.2 (0.5; 14–16) 69% UCLA-LS (10 item): 2.25 (0.5) for 33 participants Trait-judgment task: rating self, friends, teachers, and politicians with respect to 30 personality traits Loneliness was related to lower vmPFC activation during self-processing in the adolescent brain. No significant associations during friends and teacher parts of the task.…”

“…In seven studies of medial PFC (mPFC), loneliness was associated with greater mPFC activation in task-based fMRI during a social exclusion paradigm [ 24 ], less similarity between self-representation and other-representation in mPFC activation [ 44 ], lower dorsomedial PFC (dmPFC) white matter density [ 32 ], lower left dmPFC response when looking at pleasant social images and greater left dmPFC response when examining nonsocial images [ 25 ], increased functional connectivity between dmPFC and inferior parietal cortex during a working memory task [ 45 ], reduced vmPFC activation when looking at images of themselves [ 60 ], and nonsignificantly greater gray matter volumetric deviations of the vmPFC in females compared to males [ 46 ].…”

Support From Parents, Peers, and Teachers Is Differently Associated With Middle School Students’ Well-Being

“…In particular, teachers give frequent feedback-consciously and unconsciously-with respect to a student's behavior and school performance, communicating their approval to the student (Hattie and Timperley, 2007), which, in turn, may be associated with student's self-worth. This argument is supported by a neurobiological study which found that during an fMRI task, teacher appraisals, but not peer or self-referential appraisals, were linked to students' academic self-concept (Golde et al, 2019). In fact, studies indicate that how students evaluate their abilities and themselves as people depends in part on the support and feedback of their teachers (Möller and Köller, 2001a,b;Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2002;Möller et al, 2009;.…”