Expertise:
Social neuroscience, neuroimaging
John Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished
Service Professor at The University of Chicago. He serves
as the Director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience
at The University of Chicago. He has two primary lines of
research. Cacioppo and colleagues have conceptualized the
affect system as shaped by the hammer and chisel of adaptation
and natural selection. Physical limitations constrain behavioral
expressions and incline behavioral predispositions toward
a bipolar (good/bad; approach/withdraw) organization, but
these limiting conditions lose their power at the level of
underlying mechanisms. According to the model of evaluative
space (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994; Cacioppo, Gardner, & Berntson,
1997, 1999), the common metric governing approach/withdrawal
is generally a single dimension at response stages which
itself is the consequence of multiple operations, such as
the activation function for positivity (appetition) and the
activation function negativity (aversion), at earlier affective
processing stages. This formulation has revealed features
and consequences of affective processing that were not discernible
using traditional conceptualizations or measures. Current
research on this topic focuses on ambivalence and its consequences,
individual differences in affective processing, and the neural
and psychological substrates of racial prejudice. Second,
he and colleagues are investigating how social connections
or their absence (loneliness) get under the skin to affect
social cognition and emotions, personality processes, biology,
and health. Prospective studies have revealed that loneliness
is a major risk factor for psychological disturbances and
for broad-based morbidity and mortality, yet the behavioral,
psychological, and biological mechanisms are not well understood.
A meta-analysis of the literature on social support and physiology
revealed that feelings of social isolation in adults were
related to elevated blood pressure and sympathetic tonus.
In follow-up studies of loneliness in young adults, Cacioppo
and colleagues found that individuals who were chronically
lonely were characterized by elevated mean salivary cortisol
level across the course of a normal day, suggesting elevated
activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis.
Loneliness was unrelated to health behaviors (e.g., smoking,
exercise, alcohol consumption) in this sample of young adults
but loneliness was related to behavioral styles associated
with cardiovascular disease (e.g., hostility, pessimism,
insecure attachments and interactions with others) and inferior
sleep (e.g., less efficient sleep, more micro-awakenings,
feelings of sleepiness and fatigue during the day). Importantly,
an experimental study in which loneliness was manipulated
suggested that an individual’s construal of their social
relationships, and not invariant individual differences per
se, were underlying these effects.
Specific research projects:
-- Social isolation, brain, and health
-- Information biases in social and affective
processing |
