Virtual touch and the human social world

Why friendship and loneliness affect our health

Humans, like all monkeys and apes, have an intense desire to be social. The human social world, however, is extraordinarily complex, depends on sophisticated cognitive and neural processing, and is easily destabilized, with dramatic consequences for our mental and physical health. To show why, I first summarize descriptive aspects of human friendships and what they do for us, then discuss the cognitive and neurobiological processes that underpin them. I then summarize the growing body of evidence suggesting that our mental as well as our physical health and wellbeing are best predicted by the number and quality of close friend/family relationships we have, with five being the optimal number. Finally, I review neurobiological evidence that both number of friends and loneliness itself are correlated with the volume of certain key brain regions associated with the default mode neural network and its associated gray-matter processing units.

What about language?

Myths about a remote shared past can certainly promote cooperation between distantly related people, seemingly via their impact on our social cognition, and ultimately facilitate the achievement of complex tasks in large-scale societies. Nonetheless, the creation and transmission of these complex narratives are not possible without the parallel development of sophisticated language(s), endowed with properties like displacement (enabling mental travels in space and time) and complex syntax (enabling the assembly and communication of complex thoughts).

The origins and function of musical performance

Music is widely recognised as a human universal, yet there is no agreed explanation for its function, or why and when it evolved. I summarise experimental evidence that the primary function of musicking lies in social bonding, both at the dyadic and community levels, via the effect that performing any form of music has on the brain's endorphin system (the principal neurohormonal basis for social bonding in primates). The many other functions associated with music-making (mate choice, pleasure, coalition signalling, etc) are all better understood as derivative of this, either as secondary selection pressures or as windows of evolutionary opportunity (exaptations). If music's function is primarily as an adjunct of the social bonding mechanism (a feature it shares with laughter, feasting, storytelling and the rituals of religion), then reverse engineering the problem suggests that the capacity for music-making most likely evolved with the appearance of archaic humans. This agrees well with anatomical evidence for the capacity to sing.

An investigation of simulated and real touch on feelings of loneliness

As a social species, humans deprived of contact find loneliness a potentially distressing condition. Recent research emphasises the influence of touch on alleviating loneliness. This research found that touch reduces feelings of neglect, a subscale of loneliness. Affectionate touch, which demonstrates care or affection, has been previously linked to well-being in couples. Here, we investigated whether the effect of simulated touch during a video conversation might be sufficient to influence feelings of loneliness. Sixty participants answered a survey about their home life and relationships, including items that assessed the frequency of touch and feelings of loneliness. Following this, they participated in an online video call with three conditions: audio only, audio and video, or audio, video with simulated touch (a virtual 'high-five'). Finally, immediately after the call, they repeated the loneliness questionnaire. We found that loneliness scores were reduced following the call, but there was no difference among conditions and no effect of a virtual touch. However, we did find a significant association between the frequency of touch in a relationship and the expression of loneliness, with individuals in low-touch relationships having loneliness scores more comparable to single participants than to those in high-touch relationships. Additionally, extraversion played a major role in moderating the effect of touch in relationships. These results emphasise the importance of physical contact in lowering feelings of loneliness within relationships and the ability of calls to lower feelings of loneliness, regardless of whether they include video or simulated touch.

Social Isolation Affects the Mimicry Response in the Use of Smartphones : An Ethological Experiment during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Humans are social animals that rely on different ways to interact with each other. The COVID-19 pandemic strongly changed our communication strategies. Because of the importance of direct contact for our species, we predict that immediately after the forced social isolation, people were more prone to engage in direct rather than in virtual interactions, thus showing a lower mimicry response in the use of smartphones. In a non-longitudinal study, we collected behavioral data under naturalistic contexts and directly compared the data of the mimicry response gathered immediately following the Italian lockdown (May-September 2020) with those gathered one year later (May-October 2021). Contrary to our expectations, the mimicry response in the use of smartphones was higher immediately after the lockdown than a year later. Probably the large use of these devices during the lockdown translated into a greater sensitivity to be affected by others' smartphone manipulation. Indeed, social isolation modified, at least in the short term, the ways we interact with others by making us more prone to engage in "virtual" social interactions. The bright side of the coin unveiled by our findings is that the effect seems to diminish over time. The large behavioral dataset analyzed here (1,608 events; 248 people) also revealed that the mimicry response in the use of smartphones was higher between familiar subjects than between strangers. In this view, mimicry in manipulating smartphones can be considered an example of joint action that fosters behavioral synchrony between individuals that, in the long-term, can translate into the formation of social bonding.

Laughter, play faces and mimicry in animals: evolution and social functions

Human laughter and laugh faces show similarities in morphology and function with animal playful expressions. To better understand primordial uses and effects of human laughter and laugh faces, it is important to examine these positive expressions in animals from both homologous and analogous systems. Phylogenetic research on hominids provided empirical evidence on shared ancestry across these emotional expressions, including human laughter and laugh faces. In addition, playful expressions of animals, in general, arguably have a key role in the development of social cognitive skills, a role that may help explain their polyphyletic history. The present work examines the evolution and function of playful expressions in primates and other animals. As part of this effort, we also coded for muscle activations of six carnivore taxa with regard to their open-mouth faces of play; our findings provide evidence that these carnivore expressions are homologues of primate open-mouth faces of play. Furthermore, our work discusses how the expressions of animal play may communicate positive emotions to conspecifics and how the motor resonance of these expressions increases affiliation and bonding between the subjects, resembling in a number of ways the important social-emotional effects that laughter and laugh faces have in humans. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience'.