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Feeling that nobody understands, you can be bound to persistent thoughts of death.
People who often feel alienatedrecent discoveries, isolated and incomprehensible people are more likely than others to have thoughts of death or death spinning in their minds. It is not yet clear whether these feelings of isolation are the cause of these morbid thoughts, although some enticing evidence may testify to this.
"It's an experience that some people actually live, and others do it all the time," said Peter Helm, a graduate student in social psychology from the University of Arizona who led the study. "Unless we study it or we recognize it, we can not start developing interventions for it."
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Terror and death
The new research builds on the area of terrorism management, where humans build cautious barriers between themselves and become aware of their mortality. Research supporting this theory has shown that people recalled to death to become more strongly attached to their values or cultural signifiers, perhaps as a means of finding meaning for their own mortality.
Helm and his colleagues wanted to explore the links between a particular experience, that of existential isolation, and the ideas of death and mortality. Existential isolation is related to loneliness, but it's not the same thing, Helm told Live Science. Loneliness is a feeling of lack of contact with others, while existential isolation is the feeling that others simply do not understand you. Socializing while feeling existentially isolated can actually make the problem worse, Helm said.
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Helm and his colleagues conducted a series of four studies to determine whether existential isolation is related to the ideas of death. In the first two cases, the researchers asked the students (932 in the first study and 613 in the second) to complete a questionnaire to determine their basic levels of existential isolation, loneliness and the strength of their feelings identity for larger groups than them. The participants also completed a completion task in which they received a list of fragments of words that could be transformed into death-related words, depending on the person's choice. For example, COFF_ _ could become "coffee" or "coffin". KI_ _ ED could be "kissed" or "killed".
Feel isolated
In these studies, people who often reported feeling isolated in an existential way were more likely to create death-related words than people who were not very isolated in an existential way, indicating that the thoughts of the died were closer to the concerns of these isolated people. The link between existential isolation and thoughts of death can not be explained by loneliness, the strength of the sense of belonging to a group or self-esteem, Helm said. In contrast, loneliness, which was also related to the ideas of death, lost this connection once the effects of group identity, self-esteem and existential isolation have been taken into account.
"It's a further proof that it's two different concepts," Helm said.
Then the researchers tested to see if the existential isolation caused the formation of thoughts of death. The scientists gathered 277 participants and divided them into three groups. One group wrote on the memory of feeling existentially isolated, another on the feeling of loneliness and another on a neutral experience of waiting for something. In this study, those who wrote about existential isolation were later more likely than the other two groups to complete the task of completing the words with words related to death.
But in a follow-up study with 334 participants, the task of writing about existential isolation did not yield similar results.
"This raises questions about methodological concerns about how we should conduct this type of study," Helm said. The second study focused in part on people participating online, for example, who might have been more distracted or better able to comfort themselves, compared to people participating in a psychology laboratory. Alternatively, he said, the failure of replication could mean that the first study was false and that existential isolation does not directly trigger thoughts of death.
Helm added that another possibility is that the memory of existential isolation has a significant impact on the thoughts of death only for those who already tend to feel existentially isolated.
"We are looking at the connection between this experience and the alumni on campus," he said. "We see so far that they tend to feel more existential isolation."
Researchers are also studying the possible links between feelings of existential isolation and depression and suicidal ideation, says Helm. Psychologists have been studying loneliness for decades and have discovered that this emotion is linked to poor mental and physical health, he said. But the existential isolation has not attracted so much attention, although this seems to be a common experience. The new study published in the October issue of Personality Research Journal, recently posted on Reddit, says Helm, and since then he has received emails from people who have read it and that meant that the description of the experience sounded just right: they did not feel lonely they told him so, but they did it. to feel invisible
"It seems like they do not have the vocabulary to describe their experiences," Helm said.
Originally published on Science live.
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