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Loneliness is a debilitating psychological state that adversely affects the quality of life everyday for a large segment of the population 1. However, loneliness is not just a consequence of social isolation; it is a stable, heritable trait 2,3 distinguishable from other personality factors such as extraversion, neuroticism, hostility, and negative affectivity that affects the way lonely people perceive and interact with others 4. Here we show for the first time two very different patterns of neural activity that underlie this fundamental social problem. One set of brain regions, often associated with reward systems, is down-regulated in lonely people when viewing pleasant pictures involving people. Another set of brain regions, associated with visual attention and theory of mind, varies in response to unpleasant social pictures, indicating that lonely individuals are more attentive to social cues but think about this information in a more egocentric fashion than nonlonely individuals. These physiological results demonstrate how loneliness changes basic neural processing relevant to the rewards of positive social interactions and concerns about negative social interactions. http://psychology.uchicago.edu/peopl...oppoNorris.pdf
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I do not expect you will find much new here. Nonetheless, loneliness that leads to isolation is a serious problem.
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2006/are-you-lonely/all/1/
http://psychcentral.com/news/2008/09...alth/2882.html
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/1012/fe...neliness.shtml
http://www.care2.com/greenliving/lon...-friends.html#
This study,
Chicago Health Aging and Social Relations Study (CHASRS), has a number of other articles under the In Press section.