Acute social isolation for approximately 10 hours increases social craving and activates brain areas associated with dopaminergic neurons, similar to responses seen with food cues.

“So what this did is it increased social craving, both subjectively the people said that they were now craving social interactions, and then they did brain imaging in response to images of people, people interacting, food, flowers, other types of stimuli, some of the stimuli or these images that we call them stimuli but their images really, had a lot of social engagement going on in them, others did not, some had a lot of faces showing, others did not. And as you might suspect, there was activation of many of the brain areas that we've talked about earlier, dorsal raphe nucleus and other brain areas associated with dopaminergic neurons.”