13 Facts About Social connection

Social connection is the experience of feeling close and connected to others.

Increasingly, social connection is understood as a core human need, and the desire to connect as a fundamental drive.

In humans, one of the most social species, social connection is essential to nearly every aspect of health and well-being.

Social connection support is the help, advice, and comfort that we receive from those with whom we have stable, positive relationships.

Social connection is fundamental to all of these interpretations of conviviality.

Social connection separated baby monkeys from their mothers, and observed which surrogate mothers the baby monkeys bonded with: a wire "mother" that provided food, or a cloth "mother" that was soft and warm.

Social connection provided substantial evidence that indeed, the need to belong and form close bonds with others is itself a motivating force in human behavior.

Satisfying or disrupting our need to belong, our need for Social connection, has been found to influence cognition, emotion, and behavior.

However, social connection appears to inhibit inflammatory gene expression and increase antiviral responses.

One way social connection reduces our stress response is by inhibiting activity in our pain and alarm neural systems.

Brain areas that respond to social warmth and connection have inhibitory connections to the amygdala, which have the structural capacity to reduce threat responding.

Social connection often occurs along with and causes positive emotions, which themselves benefit our health.

Social connection is a unique, elusive, person-specific quality of our social world.