BACKGROUND Social isolation is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. A severe form of social isolation or social withdrawal, called hikikomori in Japan, has been described, but controversy over the etiology and universality of the phenomenon remains. METHOD Case report. RESULTS Diagnostic assessment by structured clinical interview and psychometric tools revealed hikikomori a...

Postweaning social isolation reduces the amplitude of the daily variation of CLOCK protein in the brain and induces lower reproductive activity. Gonadotropin-inhibitory hormone (GnIH) acts as an inhibitor in the reproductive system and has been linked to stress. Social isolation has been shown to lower neuronal activity of GnIH-expressing neurons in the dorsomedial hypothalamus (DMH). The exact...

Social isolation is often considered to have negative effects on cognitive function in a wide range of species. Here we assess how environmental context alters the effect of isolation on long-term memory formation (24 h) in the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis. We operantly trained snails to reduce aerial respiration in hypoxia following exposure to one of three social conditions: (1) maintained an...

COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus that originated from Wuhan and has spread throughout the world. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a global pandemic of COVID-19 infection. Under the circumstances where no vaccines or treatments are available for COVID-19, social isolation is considered to be the best preventive strategy (1). Although social isolation could be easi...

Recent work has focused on the role of the environment in psychosis with emerging evidence that specific psychotic experiences are associated with specific types of adversity. One risk factor that has been often associated with psychosis is social isolation, with studies identifying isolation as an important feature of prodromal psychosis and others reporting that social networks of psychotic p...

Objective: The evaluation of mental health among older adults has become increasingly important in health and social science. Although this has been studied in developed countries, there are also issues for emerging countries, which have aging populations. The aims of this study were to determine the prevalence of loneliness/social isolation and late-life depression among older adults with cogn...