Hi there. My name is Professor Bernadette Park, and I am in the department of psychology and neuroscience, and today I'm going to talk with you a little bit about the topics of loneliness and social belonging. My pronouns are she, her, hers. I'm going to start by just saying a little bit about myself. This is me, and I am a person who really enjoys being outside and in nature. During this pandemic I've been very grateful for where we live. I feel just being able to get outside and take a little hike or a walk, has been enormously replenishing, and I can't imagine living in an area where you're not able to do that. This is my partner, Ernie. He is also in the department of psychology and neuroscience and he does IT support. This little puppy is Ruby. Ruby is the sweetest puppy in the world. She spends most of her day pieing at me to get me to pet her, instead of letting me type on my computer. These are my girls. This is Rebecca. Rebecca is 31. She attended the University of Notre Dame, and has a degree in architecture. She's an architect now in San Francisco. This is Emma. Emma is 27, and Emma has both bachelors in linguistics and Russian studies as well as a masters in linguistics from CU. If you asked Emma's 18-year-old self, she would have told you that she did not want to go to see CU, because so many of the other students from her high school, which was Go Monarch, were attending CU and she just wanted something that was a little bit different. She started at DU, did not have a successful experience there, took a semester off, and then eventually returned to CU. Once she found, so her group or her people, or her thing, she was enormously happy with her experience at CU. I tell you all of this just because I think she would tell you that things do not always go according to plan, but there are just so many twists and turns in our lives, and even when things are difficult, it could be just a few weeks into the future when things could feel so much better, so much smoother, and a huge part of that, are the people who are around us. That's really what I'm going to be talking to you about today. I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon in 1980, GoDucks, and did my graduate work at Northwestern University, which I think are the Wildcats, but at the time I went, we were on our 17th losing season as a football team, so we didn't pay attention to that. I finished my PhD in 1985 and joined the faculty here at CU, so that's 35 years that I've been on the faculty here at CU. My passion is working to understand humans as social beings, that is, what makes us stick, what makes us thrive, what we struggle with, especially how so much of our lived experience has to do with our perspective, or how we think about the world. That's something I'll try to come back to as we go on with our talk. I have five takeaway points today that I hope I'll be able to walk through. The first one is simply that, loneliness is a thing and it has tangible consequences. The second is that the need to belong is a thing. The third is that both of these serve as cues to motivate behavior, that is, they serve an adaptive function. The fourth is that transitions necessarily mess with our sense of loneliness and belonging, and there are things we can do to counter that. Fifth, our mental construal of our social world is critical. We can use this tool, mental simulations, to help us to check on and think about our mental construal of our world. To the first point, loneliness is a thing and it has tangible consequences. This figure depicts the percentage of United States adults, who report severe psychological distress and loneliness both in 2018, 1918 that was the first flu pandemic, we'll go to 2018. So both in 2018, and then in April of 2020, that is just as we were settling into the pandemic. You can see in this highlighted rectangle that young people, in particular, reported a market increase over 2018, where just under five percent reported loneliness, psychological distress, to just under 25 percent, in 2020. Relatively speaking, these young people reported much higher levels of distress and loneliness than the other age groups. Again, this is just to make the point that loneliness is a thing. Next, we'll talk about tangible consequences, but it's particularly market right now and among young people. It turns out that prolonged and sustained loneliness, that is loneliness that you experience over a lifetime, has been shown to have significant physical consequences. Loneliness is associated with a 32 percent greater risk of having a stroke. Loneliness-induced stress impacts cortisol release and increases cravings for carbohydrates which are associated with weight gain. Loneliness increases the chance of premature death by 26 percent. It's been estimated to have the same impact on the human body as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Psychologist characterized loneliness as a social pain that's brought on by a lack of intimate relationships with others. Indeed, it turns out that being rejected has been shown to activate the same parts of the brain that are associated with physical pain. Importantly, loneliness is not simply being alone. You can be with a group that is small or large in size and still feel lonely and you can contentedly be by yourself and not feel lonely at all. I suspect that that's something that all of you have experienced, so it's not the same thing as being alone. Psychologists characterize loneliness as a motivational drive that's akin to hunger or sleepiness, so they're just as hunger signals to you that you need to eat. Loneliness should motivate you to go out and make social connections. This is something that Professor Donaldson will talk a bit more about. That loneliness drive is connected to and leads us to this concept of the need to belong. The idea behind the need to belong is that human beings have a fundamental need, which is to belong with a group of other humans, and when we don't feel that we belong, that generates anxiety for us and will take action to try to re-establish our sense of belonging. This raises the question of; Why would we be hard-wired to seek the company of others? What would the purpose be in that? Well, the idea is that evolutionarily-speaking, humans had and continue to have a much better chance of survival when we bond together in groups. As a group, we have a better chance of obtaining the food that is necessary for us to survive, we have a better chance at defending ourselves against enemies and predators, and we have a better chance of procreating and passing along our genes to future generations. Having a group of people is a good thing from the perspective of survival. To that end, we develop this need to belong, which motivates us to be a part of a group because it facilitates survival in the same way that hunger motivates us to eat or sleepiness motivates us to rest. The need to belong is characterized as valued involvement in which we feel valued, we feel needed, and we feel accepted. Moreover, we feel a sense of fit with a group, so I feel like I'm right where I belong. Because we have big brains, we developed a mechanism for signaling to us when we are in danger of being ousted from our group. We have a way to gauge our social inclusionary status. According to this theory, Sociometer theory, the whole point of self-esteem is that it serves as a gauge for monitoring our inclusionary status in our group. It serves as a sociometer. If I am behaving in a manner that makes me a good group member, I'll get positive feedback that I'm valued, that I'm needed, that I'm accepted, and that will lead me to feel good about myself that will increase self-esteem. If I'm not a good member of my group, I'll receive feedback that lets me not feel very good about myself. But self-esteem in it of itself, is not an end, but rather it's just a gauge for our role within our group. You can imagine that if you stave off and attack from the White Walkers and you're able to save your community, that will definitely lead to feedback that you're valued, needed, accepted, and your self-esteem gauge will be filled to the top. You won't fear being ousted from the group. But if instead you seek only to advance your own self-interest, perhaps even at the expense of others. Then you have reason to fear being left out in the cold to fend for yourself and most likely, you will not be having a good self-esteem day. Point number 3. Both loneliness and the need to belong serve as cues to motivate behavior, they serve an adaptive function. Just as hunger pains tell us something important about our body, "Eat. You need to eat to have fuel to do the things you want to do," so too loneliness and the need to belong tell us, "You need people." Or "For sure, you will be offed in season 2, episode 1." Fourth, I simply want to note that transitions necessarily mess with our sense of loneliness and belonging. This is a link to a short YouTube video that a young woman made that's just about how hard the transition to college can be, especially we set our expectations so high and it's hard to fulfill those expectations, particularly from the outset. It's an interesting little video, it feels pretty honest and it might be useful for you to watch some time. Change necessarily disrupts our sense of ourselves. In so many ways, college is about shaking up your sense of you to this point. You're exploring and learning about other dimensions of yourself, meeting new people, discovering new things you're passionate about or that excite you. All of that's great, but it can also be a bit unnerving because the world as you knew it is not quite the world anymore. All of that is true even without a pandemic. But fortunately, there are things that we can do to counter loneliness and to promote a sense of belonging. Remember that we said that loneliness and the need to belong are signals that have been developed to motivate behavior. We can allow those feelings, like when we're feeling lonely, when we feel like we don't really belong, we can allow those feelings to nudge us into taking action in a variety of forms. We might start a conversation with someone that we don't really know well, we might try some new activity to see if we like it, we might offer to help in some capacity, either help an individual or help with some project. It turns out that one of the best ways to combat loneliness and to increase a sense of belonging is through helping others, which is super-cool that one way that lets you feel better about yourself and that you have your groove is by doing things to help others. Former President Obama worked to establish an initiative whereby all of this would set aside a day to be engaged in community service. I just love that idea because it creates tangible positive outcomes in our communities and at the same time, it allows us to feel less isolated and more connected. In addition to taking action, We can also be aware of our thought processes that is, how we think about and construe our world or what our mindset is. As social psychologists, this fifth point is one that I find absolutely fascinating. First, just to be clear, there is an objective reality. We can't just think our way out of COVID-19 or systemic racism or income inequality. That's Ruby. There is an objective reality, but that combines with our subjective perception of the world, and we do have some control over how we construe or understand the world so we can work with our mindset in approaching the world. The challenges of remote learning. I want to describe for you one study that makes this point about the importance of our mindset and our mental construal in a way that's really profound and yet also almost ordinary. This is a study that was conducted by Greg Walton and Jeff Cohen at Stanford University entitled, A Brief Social-Belonging Intervention Improves Academic and Health Outcomes of Minority Students. This is their reasoning in this study. Freshman students who are new to campus will necessarily have bad days, days that are filled with adversity. We all have bad days, days that are filled with adversity. But again, it especially is likely to happen during times of transition when everything is new. You have a bad day and you say to yourself, "My day sucked." Again, that happens to all of us. But this can be especially problematic if you make the attribution that the reason your day sucked is that you don't belong in the place that you're at, you don't belong at that university. Walton and Cohen argued that this would be especially likely to happen for students from an ethnic minority background at an elite college, and specifically they studied African American students at Stanford. For these students, they might say, "I had a bad day, my day sucked. Why did I have a bad day? I don't really fit, I don't really belong here." To the extent that that's the attribution they make, that's going to be problematic because the only way to fix it is to leave which is not an outcome that we want. They undertook an intervention where they tried to convey to the students that this feeling of having a bad day is normal and that everyone questions whether they belong when they start college. They did this in a number of ways with the intervention. One of the things they did is they would have the students read little quotes from older students that would say things like, "Freshman year even though I met a large number of people, it didn't have a small group of close friends. I was pretty homesick and I had to remind myself that making close friends takes time. Since then I've met people some of whom are now just as close as my friends in high school were." Importantly, what they did was to normalize concerns about belonging. They presented them as being common and temporary and due to the challenging nature of the college transition. They argued that this helped prevent African American students on campus from seeing adversity as an indictment of their belonging. It normalized the bad days. It doesn't mean you don't fit in or belong. This allowed the students to persist and succeed, and indeed, the African American students in their studies had higher GPAs at the end of their four-year college career than African American students in the control group which is astounding. They also reported a decreased sense of belonging uncertainty and decreased self-doubt, and increased subjective happiness and general health relative to the control group of students. These types of studies have been conducted with other groups as well. This is a study that was conducted here at CU with women in physics courses. In this study, the students engaged in what's called the values affirmation exercise, where they wrote about values that were important to them, and many of those values had to do with social belonging. Engaging in that affirmation exercise resulted in improved course performance for these young women. The idea is that if we can remind ourselves that everyone has difficult days and that it doesn't mean that we don't belong or we don't fit, or there's something wrong with us, or if we can remind ourselves and think about values that we hold with passion and conviction, this allows us to mentally manage some of the sense of loneliness and worry over belonging. It helps us to remove some of those mental challenges, and it can help make us brave and push us to go introduce ourselves to a stranger or offer to take part in some new activity or support our community in some way. You can run mental simulations where you just mentally change some aspect of your experience, and then notice how that change makes you feel. If you knew that others were similarly experiencing loneliness or worries about belonging, would that help you to worry less about your own experiences? Would it allow you to just manage that discomfort, at least in the short term while you work to build those connections in that community and while you work to find your herd? The idea is just mentally try to create a different reality and sit with how that feels, and if that seems like a helpful thing, that might be a possible path forward for us. I'm going to leave you with these five points, and note simply that college is a time when we do a ton of identity construction and where we have an opportunity to reflect on who we want to be and who we want to show up as in the world. But we could do a whole other talk on that and they don't give me enough time to do that, so I won't. These are some additional resources for reading, if you would like. This is contact information if you have any comments or questions or you want to contact me about anything, I am good email person so feel free to contact me in that way. I just want to say thank you for allowing me to share this time with you today and to wish you all good luck. I know that the world is a pretty crazy place right now, but I also know that humans are incredibly resilient and we are hard wired to care for each other and for our world community, so don't be afraid to believe in that and to fight for that. Good luck on freshman year.
