In 1978, when the Task Panel report to the U.S. President’s Commission on Mental Health emphasized the importance of improving health care and easing the pain of those suffering from emotional distress syndromes including loneliness, few anticipated that this issue would still need to be addressed 40 years later. In 2011, a meta-analysis on the efficacy of treatments to reduce loneliness identified a need for well-controlled randomized clinical trials focusing on the rehabilitation of maladaptive social cognition. We review assessments of loneliness and build on this meta-analysis to discuss the efficacy of various treatments for loneliness. With the advances made over the past 5 years in the identification of the psychobiological and pharmaceutical mechanisms associated with loneliness and maladaptive social cognition, there is increasing evidence for the potential efficacy of integrated interventions that combine (social) cognitive behavioral therapy with short-term adjunctive pharmacological treatments.

Prior research has suggested that loneliness is associated with an implicit hypervigilance to social threats—an assumption in line with the evolutionary model of loneliness that indicates feeling socially isolated (or on the social perimeter) leads to increased attention and surveillance of the social world and an unwitting focus on self-preservation. Little is known, however, about the temporal dynamics for social threat (vs. nonsocial threat) in the lonely brains. We used high-density electrical neuroimaging and a behavioral task including social and nonsocial threat (and neutral) pictures to investigate the brain dynamics of implicit processing for social threat vs. nonsocial threat stimuli in lonely participants (N = 10), compared to nonlonely individuals (N = 9). The present study provides evidence that social threat images are differentiated from nonsocial threat stimuli more quickly in the lonely (~116 ms after stimulus onset) than nonlonely (~252 ms after stimulus onset) brains. That speed of threat processing in lonely individuals is in accord with the evolutionary model of loneliness. Brain source estimates expanded these results by suggesting that lonely (but not nonlonely) individuals showed early recruitment of brain areas involved in attention and self-representation.

Recent advances in neuroimaging offer an unprecedented window into the female sexual brain. The small samples and poor statistical power of individual functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have limited what can be gleaned about the systematic brain network that is involved in female sexual desire and female sexual dysfunction (eg, hypoactive sexual desire disorder [HSDD]). To quantitatively determine the brain network involved in HSDD. Systematic retrospective review and statistical meta-analysis of pertinent neuroimaging literature. Review of published literature on functional magnetic resonance imaging studies illustrating brain regions associated with female sexual desire and female HSDD. HSDD is associated with a specific fronto-limbic-parietal dysfunction characterized by (i) lower blood oxygen level-dependent responses in the sexual desire brain network and (ii) higher blood oxygen level-dependent responses in the self-referential brain network. The meta-analytic results are in line with a top-down neurofunctional model of HSDD in which inspecting, monitoring, and evaluating oneself (rather than sensory experience) before or during sexual activities interfere with sexual desire. These results raise new questions regarding the necessity and sufficiency of dysfunctional activation in the sexual desire and self-referential brain networks, whose answers bear on the development and evaluation of personalized treatments for HSDD. Cacioppo S. Neuroimaging of Female Sexual Desire and Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder. Sex Med Rev 2017;5:434-444.

Although a large number of fMRI studies have investigated the neural basis of empathy, little is known about its spatiotemporal dynamics. Moreover, most of the previous studies on empathy have focused on empathy for pain rather than empathy for positive emotions, such as happiness. In the present study, we addressed this question by investigating the spatiotemporal dynamics of different kinds of empathy by combining electrophysiological recordings with a behavioral priming empathy task involving negative and positive emotions. Electrical brain activity and behavioral data were analyzed from 30 subjects (12 males and 18 females). Half of the subjects performed a behavioral task on empathy for pain (EP task), while the other half performed a behavioral task on empathy for happiness (EH task). In each task, participants viewed prime photographs of either: 1) a stranger; or 2) a close friend (primes) followed by target photographs showing either a hand being hurt (or not; targets in the EP task), or a hand in happy circumstances (or not; targets in the EH task). In each task, participants were asked to judge the target situation and report whether they could feel the pain (in EP task) or the happiness (in the EH task), as a function of the primes i.e., either from the close friend’s or from the stranger’s perspective. Overall, our results suggest that taking the perspective of a close friend (compared to that of a stranger), as a prime stimulus, does have a dual-stage effect on empathy that is characterized by an early modulation for pain and later modulations for both pain and happiness. The early differences between friend and stranger primes for pain (but not for happiness) suggest that empathy for pain is an automatic process that has been socially learned and passed among friends. On the other hand, the later differences observed between stranger and friend primes suggest additional cognitive appraisal take place for both pain and happiness. Our results suggest that it takes more cognitive attentional efforts to judge a stranger’s happiness than a friend’s, whereas the opposite is true for pain.