人為什么會感到孤獨？

Nobody likes feeling lonely, and some recent research suggests that the ache of isolation isn't only a psychological problem; unwanted solitude impacts physical health, too. Loneliness increases a person's risk of mortality by 26 percent, an effect comparable to the health risks posed by obesity, according to a study published this spring.

沒有人喜歡孤獨的感覺。最近某調(diào)查顯示，孤獨造成的痛苦不僅是心理問題，不是出自本意所需的孤獨還會影響到身體健康。根據(jù)一項今年春季發(fā)布的研究，孤獨會使一個人的死亡風險提高26%，這與過度肥胖造成的健康風險程度相當。

And because of this new evidence of the serious ramifications of loneliness, some researchers are investigating what it is, exactly, that makes lonely people stay lonely. In particular, could some behavior be at the root of their isolation?

由于新發(fā)現(xiàn)了這一孤獨導致的嚴重后果，一些研究人員正在著手研究具體是什么東西使人處于孤獨之中，特別是，會不會有某些行為是孤獨的根源。

In a paper recently published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Franklin & Marshall College professor Megan L. Knowles led four experiments that demonstrated lonely people's tendency to choke when under social pressure. In one, Knowles and her team tested the social skills of 86 undergraduates, showing them 24 faces on a computer screen and asking them to name the basic human emotion each face was displaying: anger, fear, happiness, or sadness. She told some of the students that she was testing their social skills, and that people who failed at this task tended to have difficulty forming and maintaining friendships. But she framed the test differently for the rest of them, describing it as a this-is-all-theoretical kind of exercise.

在最近于《個性與社會心理學通報》發(fā)表的一篇論文中，富蘭克林與馬歇爾學院的教授梅根.L.諾爾斯指導了4個實驗，這些實驗顯示出，孤獨的人在社交壓力之下有不能正常運用社交技巧的傾向。在其中一個實驗中，諾爾斯和她的團隊對86名大學生的社交技巧進行了測試。她在電腦屏幕上給他們展示了24張人臉圖像，并讓他們說出每一張臉表達的基本情緒：憤怒、恐懼、快樂或是悲傷。她告訴其中的一些學生，說她測試的是他們的社交技巧，而沒有通過測試的人很可能在友誼的建立和維系上有困難。但是她對另外的學生卻有不同的說法，她說這完全是個理論性質(zhì)的練習。

Before they started any of that, though, all the students completed surveys that measured how lonely they were. In the end, the lonelier students did worse than the non-lonely students on the emotion-reading task — but only when they were told they were being tested on their social skills. When the lonely were told they were just taking a general knowledge test, they performed better than the non-lonely. Previous research echoes these new results: Past studies have suggested, for example, that the lonelier people are better at accurately reading facial expressions and decoding tone of voice. As the theory goes, lonely people may be paying closer attention to emotional cues precisely because of their ache to belong somewhere and form interpersonal connections, which results in technically superior social skills.

在所有的測試之前，所有的學生都完成了一份衡量他們孤獨程度的調(diào)查。結果，孤獨的學生在情感辨別測試上比不孤獨的學生做得要差，但這種情況只有在告訴他們這是個社交技巧測試時才會出現(xiàn)。當孤獨的人被告知他們只是在做常識測試時，他們比不孤獨的人表現(xiàn)得更好。更早以前的研究也得出過相似的結果：比如過去有研究表明，孤獨的人更善于準確識別面部表情，解讀說話者語氣中蘊含的信息。這個理論認為，孤獨的人可能會更細致地關注情感暗示，因為他們渴望得到歸屬感、建立起人與人之間的聯(lián)系。確切意義上來講，這使得他們擁有了更優(yōu)秀的社交技巧。

But like a baseball pitcher with a mean case of the yips or a nervous test-taker sitting down for an exam, being hyperfocused on not screwing up can lead to over-thinking and second-guessing, which, of course, can end up causing the very screwup the person was so bent on avoiding. It's largely a matter of reducing that performance anxiety, in other words, and Knowles and her colleagues did manage to find one way to do this for their lonely study participants, though, admittedly, it is maybe not exactly applicable outside of a lab. The researchers gave their volunteers an energy-drink-like beverage and told them that any jitters they felt were owing to the caffeine they’d just consumed. (In actuality, the beverage contained no caffeine, but no matter — the study participants believed that it did.) They then did the emotion-reading test, just like in the first experiment. Compared to scores from that first experiment, there was no discernible difference in scores for the non-lonely, but the researchers did see improvement among the lonely participants — even when the task had been framed as a social-skills test.

不過，就像因過度緊張而無法正常發(fā)揮的排球發(fā)球手或是在考場中緊張的考生一樣，總想著不把事情弄糟會使你對事態(tài)的進展顧慮重重，如此一來，結果必然還是會搞砸，盡管你已經(jīng)努力避免把事情弄糟了。換句話說，問題大概還是在于降低對自我表現(xiàn)的焦慮，諾爾斯和她的同事也確實找到了方法幫助參與他們研究的孤獨者，雖然不可否認的是，這可能不適用于實驗室外的情況。研究人員讓志愿者喝下一種看上去像能量飲料的液體，并跟他們說他們的緊張感都是他們剛剛吸收的咖啡因引起的。(實際上那些飲料里不含咖啡因，不過沒關系，志愿者相信里面有。)然后他們做了情感識別測試，就像第一個實驗那樣。與第一個實驗的分數(shù)比起來，不孤獨的人的得分沒有明顯的變化，但研究者卻發(fā)現(xiàn)孤獨的志愿者得分提高了，甚至在告訴他們這是個社交技能測試后也是如此。

It may be difficult to trick yourself into believing your nerves are from caffeine and not the fact that you really, really, really want to make a good impression in some social setting, but there are other ways to change your own thinking about anxiety. One of my recent favorites is from Harvard Business School's Alison Wood Brooks, who found that when she had people reframe their nerves as excitement, theysubsequently performed better on some mildly terrifying task, like singing in public. At the very least, this current research presents a fairly new way to think about lonely people. It's not that they need to brush up on the basics of social skills — that they've likely already got down. Instead, lonely people may need to focus more on getting out of their own heads, so they can actually use the skills they've got to form friendships and begin to find a way out of their isolation.

要欺騙自己去相信緊張感是咖啡因的作用而不是真的、真的、真的想在社交場合中留下好印象，這或許很難，但是我們有其他方法來改變我們對焦慮的看法。哈佛商學院的艾莉森·伍德·布魯克斯的研究是我最近的最愛之一，她讓人們把緊張重新界定為興奮，之后他們在完成一些稍微有些嚇人的任務時表現(xiàn)得更好了，比方說在公共場合唱歌。不管怎樣，當前的這項研究給我們展現(xiàn)了一個看待孤獨者的新方式。他們并不需要提高基本的社交技巧，他們大都已經(jīng)掌握了。他們需要的是努力不讓自己胡思亂想，這樣他們就可以真正地用上自己已經(jīng)擁有的社交技巧去建立友誼、走出孤獨。