With the days getting shorter (and colder) and the Holidays quickly approaching, many of us start thinking back to days gone by. This sentimentality and desire for the past is known as nostalgia.

The troubling link between boom towns and high rates of substance abuse is usually attributed to workers having too much money and too little to do. But a recent study of one Canadian community suggests underlying pressures including loneliness, a lack of healthy social connections and a need to “keep up with the Joneses”.

New research at the University of Chicago finds evidence for a clever way that people manage to alleviate the pain of loneliness: They create people in their surroundings to keep them company.

In the Peanuts comic strip, Charlie Brown was never able to kick the football, fly a kite properly or lead a baseball team. He was also sad and often the target of ridicule from his peers.

People who experience chronically high levels of loneliness show gene-expression patterns that differ markedly from those of people who don't feel lonely, according to a new molecular analysis in the online open access journal Genome Biology.

Two University of Chicago psychologists, Louise Hawkley and John Cacioppo, have been trying to disentangle social isolation, loneliness, and the physical deterioration and diseases of aging, right down to the cellular level.