According to a recent study, there is a close link between the loneliness and memory development, especially in young people. Conducted by the Psychology department of the Sapienza University of Rome, the study focused on 235 university studentsdetermining that those who spend a lot of time alone struggle, in the long run, to recognize the faces of unfamiliar people, but who have met and met several times.
Furthermore, solitude would be a double-edged sword, because from this conditioning, the subject ends up in a sort of abyss which does not allow him to weave new friendships. But let’s proceed in order, starting from the ways in which the study was conducted. Of the 235 participants, 42 males and 192 females between the ages of 18 and 30, approximately 50% said they spent a lot of time alone. Everyone was shown photos of some first subjects of various ages who expressed happiness, anger or were neutral, asking to memorize them. In a second phase, then, other faces were shown, mixed with some of those already shown. The weight of loneliness in the recognition was 35.6%.
How loneliness affects memory
Overall, participants who had a high level of loneliness had the 35.6% less ability to recognize the same faces of happy people. In fact, there was no discrepancy between participants regarding angry or neutral faces. The conclusion? Those who spend a lot of time alone have more difficulty remembering the faces of unfamiliar people, especially the expression of a feeling of happiness.
An important result, which also extends to the lockdown period in which many young people were forced into a sort of complete solitude. Furthermore, particularly worrying would be the fact that the faces that are most easily forgotten are the happy ones, ie those that show a certain openness towards the interlocutor. It would be a sort of loop, in which people with a high level of loneliness struggle to remember the faces of happy strangers, chronicling their isolation situation. Furthermore, the study also pointed out how the lonely elderly chronic tend to have a mortality greater than about 20% than those who have habitual relationships with friends or strangers.
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