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Scholarly Works (8 results)

  • Thesis
  • Peer Reviewed
UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2022)

As inextricably social beings, humans harbor (perceptions of) quality social connection as a vital homeostatic need. Our evolved fundamental need to belong drives much of our emotion, perception, and cognition, since quality social connection is required for optimal physiological and psychological functioning.Research on loneliness—perceived social isolation—reveals widespread physiological degradation and increased mortality risk when loneliness persists, situating social connection as a core component of psychosocial health. Loneliness, pervasive and dangerous, is a growing public health concern, yet it has proven difficult to ameliorate. Loneliness underlies many illnesses and more research on its mechanisms and frailties is urgently needed. Research on interoception—perception, regulation, and appraisal of bodily states—has recently surged driven by recognition of interoceptive mechanisms supporting emotional clarity, with promise of improving clinical disorders and psychosocial health. The burgeoning field of “social interoception” has just begun to examine interoception in loneliness, and our research represents some of the first studies on interoceptive mechanisms supporting social connection. However, what comprises perceptions of connection? Does quality social connection depend, in part, on a sense of intra-personal integration, clarity, or “connection”? This dissertation addresses these questions by focusing on a range of intra-personal and interoceptive mechanisms supporting social connection.

Chapter 1 assesses how different types of comparisons—intra-personal and social—impact perceptions of loneliness, using mixed methodology across diverse populations. Chapter 2 investigates physiological responses in loneliness using facial electromyography (fEMG) to assess spontaneous smiling and frowning activity during emotional perception. Chapter 3 addresses intra-personal affective correlates of loneliness using meta-analysis on 17 samples of cross-sectional survey data, highlighting the role of interoceptive body trust.

Altogether, this dissertation indicates that the common experience of loneliness is associated with maladaptive social cognition, behavior, and emotional processing. Interoception may represent “intra-personal connection” which impacts perceptions and fulfillment of quality social connection. Further investigations of interoception in affective social neuroscience, clinical psychology, and social connection will benefit from this research.

    Cover page: Some Body to Love: Intrapersonal and interoceptive components of social connection
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2021)
    As social beings, humans harbor an evolved capacity for loneliness - perceived social isolation. Loneliness is associated with atypical affective and social processing, as well as physiological dysregulation. We investigated how loneliness influences spontaneous facial mimicry (SFM), an interpersonal response involved in social connection and emotional contagion. We presented participants with emotional stimuli, such as video clips of actors expressing anger, fear, sadness, or joy, and emotional IAPS images. We measured participants' zygomaticus major ("smiling") muscle and their corrugator supercilii ("frowning") muscle with facial electromyography (fEMG). We also measured self-reported loneliness, depression, and extraversion levels. For socially connected individuals we found intact SFM, as reflected in greater fEMG activity of the zygomaticus and corrugator to positive and negative expressions, respectively. However, individuals reporting higher levels of loneliness lacked SFM for expressions of joy. Loneliness did not impair deliberate mimicry activity to the same expressions, or spontaneous reactions to positive, negative, or neutral IAPS images. Depression and extraversion did not predict any differences in fEMG responses. We suggest that impairments in spontaneous "smiling back" at another - a decreased interpersonal resonance - could contribute to negative social and emotional consequences of loneliness and may facilitate loneliness contagion.
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2019)
      Interoception - the process of sensing bodily signals - has gained much interest in recent years, due to its role in physical and mental well-being. Here, we focus on the role of interoception in social connection, which is a relatively new and growing research area. Studies in this area suggest that interoception may help in appraising physiological signals in social situations, but also that (challenging) social situations may reduce interoceptive processing by shifting attention from internally- to externally- focused. We discuss potential mechanisms for the influence of interoception on social connection and highlight that flexibility in engaging interoception in social situations may be particularly important. We end with a discussion of loneliness - an extreme case of poor social connection, which is associated with physiological decline and increased mortality risk, and propose that interoceptive dysregulation is involved. We suggest that interventions aimed to improve interoceptive abilities, such as mindfulness-based meditation practices, may be key for alleviating loneliness and improving social connection.
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2021)
        Loneliness-perceived social isolation-is defined as a discrepancy between existing social relationships and desired quality of relationships. Whereas most research has focused on existing relationships, we consider the standards against which people compare them. Participants who made downward social or temporal comparisons that depicted their contact with others as better (compared to other people's contact or compared to the past) reported less loneliness than participants who made upward comparisons that depicted their contact with others as worse (Study 1-3). Extending these causal results, in a survey of British adults, upward social comparisons predicted current loneliness, even when controlling for loneliness at a previous point in time (Study 4). Finally, content analyses of interviews with American adults who lived alone showed that social and temporal comparisons about contact with others were both prevalent and linked to expressed loneliness (Study 5). These findings contribute to understanding the social cognition of loneliness, extend the effects of comparisons about social connection to the important public health problem of loneliness, and provide a novel tool for acutely manipulating loneliness.
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2021)
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UCLA Previously Published Works (2016)

            Purpose

            We sought to develop and characterize a model of human vitamin D nutritional insufficiency/deficiency in the adult mouse, which could have broad utility in examining health consequences of this common condition.

            Methods

            Adult mice were fed diets containing cholecalciferol contents of 0.05 IU/g, 0.25 IU/g, 0.5 IU/g or 1.5 IU/g for four months. We studied induction of steady-state vitamin D insufficiency, and its consequences on primary cholecalciferol metabolite levels, calcium homeostasis, parathyroid physiology, and bone morphology.

            Results

            All diets were well tolerated, without adverse effects on body weight. Diets containing 0.05 IU/g and 0.25 IU/g cholecalciferol significantly lowered serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels (median 25OHD, 10.5 ng/ml, and 21.6 ng/ml, respectively), starting as early as one month following initiation of the diets, maintained through the four-month experimental period. The 0.05 IU/g diet significantly decreased 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25OH2D) levels (median, 78 pg/ml). Despite these decreased 25OHD and 1,25OH2D levels, the diets did not alter parathyroid gland morphology or parathyroid cell proliferation. There were no statistical differences in the serum total calcium and serum PTH levels among the various dietary groups. Furthermore, the 0.05 IU/g diet did not cause any alterations in the cortical and trabecular bone morphology, as determined by microCT.

            Conclusions

            The dietary manipulations yielded states of vitamin D insufficiency or modest deficiency in adult mice, with no overtly detectable impact on parathyroid and bone physiology, and calcium homeostasis. This model system may be of value to study health effects of vitamin D insufficiency/deficiency especially on extraskeletal phenotypes such as cancer susceptibility or immune function.
              Cover page: Modeling vitamin D insufficiency and moderate deficiency in adult mice via dietary cholecalciferol restriction
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              UC Davis Previously Published Works (2015)
              Cyclin D1 is an important molecular driver of human breast cancer but better understanding of its oncogenic mechanisms is needed, especially to enhance efforts in targeted therapeutics. Currently, pharmaceutical initiatives to inhibit cyclin D1 are focused on the catalytic component since the transforming capacity is thought to reside in the cyclin D1/CDK activity. We initiated the following study to directly test the oncogenic potential of catalytically inactive cyclin D1 in an in vivo mouse model that is relevant to breast cancer. Herein, transduction of cyclin D1(-/-) mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) with the kinase dead KE mutant of cyclin D1 led to aneuploidy, abnormalities in mitotic spindle formation, autosome amplification, and chromosomal instability (CIN) by gene expression profiling. Acute transgenic expression of either cyclin D1(WT) or cyclin D1(KE) in the mammary gland was sufficient to induce a high CIN score within 7 days. Sustained expression of cyclin D1(KE) induced mammary adenocarcinoma with similar kinetics to that of the wild-type cyclin D1. ChIP-Seq studies demonstrated recruitment of cyclin D1(WT) and cyclin D1(KE) to the genes governing CIN. We conclude that the CDK-activating function of cyclin D1 is not necessary to induce either chromosomal instability or mammary tumorigenesis.
                Cover page: Kinase-independent role of cyclin D1 in chromosomal instability and mammary tumorigenesis
                • Article
                • Peer Reviewed
                Environ Genomics & Systems Bio (2016)
                The National Institutes of Health Undiagnosed Diseases Program (NIH UDP) applies translational research systematically to diagnose patients with undiagnosed diseases. The challenge is to implement an information system enabling scalable translational research. The authors hypothesized that similar complex problems are resolvable through process management and the distributed cognition of communities. The team, therefore, built the NIH UDP integrated collaboration system (UDPICS) to form virtual collaborative multidisciplinary research networks or communities. UDPICS supports these communities through integrated process management, ontology-based phenotyping, biospecimen management, cloud-based genomic analysis, and an electronic laboratory notebook. UDPICS provided a mechanism for efficient, transparent, and scalable translational research and thereby addressed many of the complex and diverse research and logistical problems of the NIH UDP. Full definition of the strengths and deficiencies of UDPICS will require formal qualitative and quantitative usability and process improvement measurement.
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