Researchers asked people to watch videos of scenes that were busy with social interactions, such as film of a school corridor. They then tracked their saccades so they could see which elements the participants’ brains were attending to. Those with ‘past histories of social success’ spent most of their time on people being friendly – smiling, chatting, nodding. But those who’d had high-school experiences of loneliness and social isolation ‘scarcely looked at the positive scenes at all’, writes Prinstein. Instead they spent around eighty per cent of their time looking at people being unfriendly
...more
