A proposition I have come up with: Loneliness is wanting or needing some particular kind of interaction with other people, and not getting it. (Consequently there are different kinds of loneliness for each different desired interaction.)
... I would try to compare this with the content of the article, but I find it difficult to interpret. First, the title appears at odds with the studies: "respond more negatively to social stimuli", without qualifiers, implies "to [all] social stimuli"; while the studies apparently showed "electrical activity ... was more extreme than that of non-lonely people when shown negative social cues", rather different from all.
Second, its presentation of the studies seems to be cut off: it describes the precise setup of each study, the numbers of people in each group and of positive/negative, social/nonsocial words, and then goes into general commentary. The only description of the results that we have is three paragraphs earlier, where it says the abovementioned about "lonely => negative-social is even worse" but doesn't mention the other outcomes. I don't see a link to either study. In theory I could assume that the fact that she didn't mention the other outcomes was because lonely people were equivalent to non-lonely people in the other scenarios, but the inappropriate title and the way that it's presented as a non-technical article for non-technical people don't give me faith in such an assumption. So unfortunately I don't have much to go on.
(Actually, it sort of looks like someone took a technical article summarizing the studies, and a "discussion and advice aimed at a general audience", and interleaved several paragraphs from the former into the latter. Well, anyway.)
... I would try to compare this with the content of the article, but I find it difficult to interpret. First, the title appears at odds with the studies: "respond more negatively to social stimuli", without qualifiers, implies "to [all] social stimuli"; while the studies apparently showed "electrical activity ... was more extreme than that of non-lonely people when shown negative social cues", rather different from all.
Second, its presentation of the studies seems to be cut off: it describes the precise setup of each study, the numbers of people in each group and of positive/negative, social/nonsocial words, and then goes into general commentary. The only description of the results that we have is three paragraphs earlier, where it says the abovementioned about "lonely => negative-social is even worse" but doesn't mention the other outcomes. I don't see a link to either study. In theory I could assume that the fact that she didn't mention the other outcomes was because lonely people were equivalent to non-lonely people in the other scenarios, but the inappropriate title and the way that it's presented as a non-technical article for non-technical people don't give me faith in such an assumption. So unfortunately I don't have much to go on.
(Actually, it sort of looks like someone took a technical article summarizing the studies, and a "discussion and advice aimed at a general audience", and interleaved several paragraphs from the former into the latter. Well, anyway.)