ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2024
Away from the herd: loneliness as a dysfunction of social alignment.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 11 citations in OpenAlex.
- Loneliness Biases Social Engagement Decisions: Evidence From Value-Based Choice Models.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Cardiac Synchrony During Collaborative Drawing: A Longitudinal Comparison of Same Generation and Intergenerational Dyads.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- The role of space availability and affiliation in shaping equine social distances and dynamics.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The neuroexistentialism of social connectedness and loneliness.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The tendency of all humans to experience loneliness at some point in their lives implies that it serves an adaptive function. Building on biological theories of herding in animals, according to which collective movement emerges from local interactions that are based on principles of attraction, repulsion and alignment, we propose an approach that synthesizes these principles with theories of loneliness in humans. We present here the 'herding model of loneliness' that extends these principles into the psychological domain. We hold that these principles serve as basic building blocks of human interactions and propose that distorted attraction and repulsion tendencies may lead to inability to align properly with others, which may be a core component in loneliness emergence and perpetuation. We describe a neural model of herding in humans and suggest that loneliness may be associated with altered interactions between the gap/error detection, reward signaling, threat and observation-execution systems. The proposed model offers a framework to predict the behavior of lonely individuals and thus may inform intervention designs for reducing loneliness intensity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.