Greater Risk of Negative Health Outcomes of Older Adults Living Alone in Vietnam: A Community Survey

In modern Asian societies, there has been a shift in the living arrangements of older adults away from living with others. Knowing the health characteristics of individuals living alone can help identify high-risk groups. This cross-sectional study aimed to describe characteristics of the Vietnamese older adults and to investigate the association between living alone and their reported health outcomes by utilizing survey data of individuals aged ≥60 years in Vietnam in 2018. The community survey included questions about sociodemographic factors, living arrangement, and self-reported physical functional status. Multivariate logistic regression was used to examine whether or not living alone was a predictor of health outcomes. Of 725 study participants, 8.9% lived alone. These participants were more likely to be female, aged 70–79 years, living in rural areas, and currently single or previously married. After adjusting for covariates, older adults who were living alone were more likely to have arthritis (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 1.95, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.10–3.45), a history of falling (AOR = 2.44, 95% CI: 1.02–5.82), visual difficulties (AOR = 1.89, 95% CI: 1.04–3.41), feelings of loneliness (AOR = 1.95, 95% CI: 1.10–3.47), and high fear of falling (AOR = 1.88, 95% CI: 1.02–3.46). Older adults living alone in Vietnam were at greater risk of negative health consequences than those living with others. Screening and providing adequate social support for this specific population is important in preventing the adverse effects of solitary living among these older adults.

Solitary Living Brings a Decreased Weight and an Increased Agility to the Domestic Silkworm, Bombyx mori

The domestic silkworms, Bombyx mori, always live in groups and little is known of the outcomes of solitary living. We bred solitary silkworms and performed a comprehensive investigation of the difference between solitary and group-living silkworms. The results show that solitary silkworms had significantly lower weights than group-living counterparts. Moreover, solitary silkworms had faster movements under food luring or heat stress than the group-living ones, supported by extensive behavior experiments. These findings inferred that an increased agility resulted from solitary living. For an understanding of the molecular mechanism associated with solitary living, we performed integrated mRNA and miRNA (microRNA) sequencing of tissues for solitary and group-living silkworms. We identified 165 differently expressed genes (DEGs) and 6 differently expressed miRNAs between the solitary and group-living silkworms. Functional and pathway analyses indicated that these DEGs are associated with weight loss and agility increase. These findings compose a sketch depicting an association between the phenotypes and genes resulted from solitary living and refresh the understanding of solitary living and loneliness, which has an increased prevalence in our modern society.

Home alone: A population neuroscience investigation of brain morphology substrates

As a social species, ready exchange with peers is a pivotal asset - our 'social capital'. Yet, single-person households have come to pervade metropolitan cities worldwide, with unknown consequences in the long run. Here, we systematically explore the morphological manifestations associated with singular living in ~40,000 UK Biobank participants. The uncovered population-level signature spotlights the highly associative default mode network, in addition to findings such as in the amygdala central, cortical and corticoamygdaloid nuclei groups, as well as the hippocampal fimbria and dentate gyrus. Sex-stratified analyses revealed male-specific neural substrates, including somatomotor, saliency and visual systems, while female-specific neural substrates centred on the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. In line with our demographic profiling results, the discovered neural imprint of living alone is potentially linked to alcohol and tobacco consumption, anxiety, sleep quality as well as daily TV watching. The secular trend for solitary living will require new answers from public-health decision makers.

Binary Sensors-Based Privacy-Preserved Activity Recognition of Elderly Living Alone Using an RNN

The recent growth of the elderly population has led to the requirement for constant home monitoring as solitary living becomes popular. This protects older people who live alone from unwanted instances such as falling or deterioration caused by some diseases. However, although wearable devices and camera-based systems can provide relatively precise information about human motion, they invade the privacy of the elderly. One way to detect the abnormal behavior of elderly residents under the condition of maintaining privacy is to equip the resident’s house with an Internet of Things system based on a non-invasive binary motion sensor array. We propose to concatenate external features (previous activity and begin time-stamp) along with extracted features with a bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) neural network to recognize the activities of daily living with a higher accuracy. The concatenated features are classified by a fully connected neural network (FCNN). The proposed model was evaluated on open dataset from the Center for Advanced Studies in Adaptive Systems (CASAS) at Washington State University. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art models with a margin of more than 6.25% of the F1 score on the same dataset.

Individual Differences in the Vocal Communication of Malayan Tapirs (Tapirus indicus) Considering Familiarity and Relatedness

Studies in animal communication have shown that many species have individual distinct calls. These individual distinct vocalizations can play an important role in animal communication because they can carry important information about the age, sex, personality, or social role of the signaler. Although we have good knowledge regarding the importance of individual vocalization in social living mammals, it is less clear to what extent solitary living mammals possess individual distinct vocalizations. We recorded and analyzed the vocalizations of 14 captive adult Malayan tapirs (Tapirus indicus) (six females and eight males) to answer this question. We investigated whether familiarity or relatedness had an influence on call similarity. In addition to sex-related differences, we found significant differences between all subjects, comparable to the individual differences found in highly social living species. Surprisingly, kinship appeared to have no influence on call similarity, whereas familiar subjects exhibited significantly higher similarity in their harmonic calls compared to unfamiliar or related subjects. The results support the view that solitary animals could have individual distinct calls, like highly social animals. Therefore, it is likely that non-social factors, like low visibility, could have an influence on call individuality. The increasing knowledge of their behavior will help to protect this endangered species.

Coevolution of group-living and aposematism in caterpillars: warning colouration may facilitate the evolution from group-living to solitary habits

Background Animals use diverse antipredator mechanisms, including visual signalling of aversive chemical defence (aposematism). However, the initial evolution of aposematism poses the problem that the first aposematic individuals are conspicuous to predators who have not learned the significance of the warning colouration. In one scenario, aposematism evolves in group-living species and originally persisted due to kin selection or positive frequency-dependent selection in groups. Alternatively, group-living might evolve after aposematism because grouping can amplify the warning signal. However, our current understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of these traits is limited, leaving the relative merit of these scenarios unresolved. Results We used a phylogenetic comparative approach to estimate phenotypic evolutionary models to enable inferences regarding ancestral states and trait dynamics of grouping and aposematic colouration in a classic model system (caterpillars). We find strong support for aposematism at the root of the clade, and some (but weaker) support for ancestral solitary habits. Transition rates between aposematism and crypsis are generally higher than those between group-living and solitary-living, suggesting that colouration is more evolutionarily labile than aggregation. We also find that the transition from group-living to solitary-living states can only happen in aposematic lineage, suggesting that aposematism facilitates the evolution of solitary caterpillars, perhaps due to the additional protection offered when the benefits of grouping are lost. We also find that the high frequency of solitary, cryptic caterpillars is because this state is particularly stable, in that the transition rates moving towards this state are substantially higher than those moving away from it, favouring its accumulation in the clade over evolutionary time. Conclusions Our results provide new insights into the coevolution of colour and aggregation in caterpillars. We find support for an aposematic caterpillar at the root of this major clade, and for the signal augmentation hypothesis as an explanation of the evolution of aposematic, group-living caterpillars. We find that colouration is more labile than aggregation behaviour, but that the combination of solitary and cryptic habits is particularly stable. Finally, our results reveal that the transitions from group-living to solitary-living could be facilitated by aposematism, providing a new link between these well-studied traits.

Aggregative cycles evolve as a solution to conflicts in social investment

Multicellular organization is particularly vulnerable to conflicts between different cell types when the body forms from initially isolated cells, as in aggregative multicellular microbes. Like other functions of the multicellular phase, coordinated collective movement can be undermined by conflicts between cells that spend energy in fuelling motion and ‘cheaters’ that get carried along. The evolutionary stability of collective behaviours against such conflicts is typically addressed in populations that undergo extrinsically imposed phases of aggregation and dispersal. Here, via a shift in perspective, we propose that aggregative multicellular cycles may have emerged as a way to temporally compartmentalize social conflicts. Through an eco-evolutionary mathematical model that accounts for individual and collective strategies of resource acquisition, we address regimes where different motility types coexist. Particularly interesting is the oscillatory regime that, similarly to life cycles of aggregative multicellular organisms, alternates on the timescale of several cell generations phases of prevalent solitary living and starvation-triggered aggregation. Crucially, such self-organized oscillations emerge as a result of evolution of cell traits associated to conflict escalation within multicellular aggregates.

A sociological perspective on the phenomenon of solo-living in Eastern Europe: An attempt at conceptualization

This article examines the phenomenon of solitary living as a consequence of the processes of individualization that are characteristic of the entire modern world. The urgency of this problem arises from the increase in the number of individuals who prefer to live alone. Although this trend is typical for Eastern Europe, as it is for the rest of the world, it is not widely considered in scientific circles. Whilst analyzing scientific literature in different spheres (philosophy, economics, psychology, sociology) and statistical data on solitary living, the author has come to the conclusion that to describe the phenomenon in a sociological vein, it is most appropriate to consider solitary living as a “solo-living” lifestyle. The article also examines the main studies of solitary living in Eastern Europe, and through such work, it was concluded that there is not enough research: current research mainly considers single living among the older generation, despite the fact that the number of young people who prefer this lifestyle continues to grow. In the course of the study, the author was faced with the problem of layering related concepts: solos, singles, solo-living, single-person households, and others. To avoid this problem, the author distinguishes between these concepts and makes an attempt to conceptualize the concept of “solo-living”, offers the author’s definition, and outlines further research prospects.

Total Umwelten Create Shared Meaning the Emergent Properties of Animal Groups as a Result of Social Signalling

In this paper, I discuss the concept of ‘shared meaning’, and the relationship between a shared understanding of signs within an animal social group and the Umwelten of individuals within the group. I explore the concept of the ‘Total Umwelt’, as described by Tønnesen, (2003), and use examples from the traditional ethology literature to demonstrate how semiotic principles can not only be applied, but underpin the observations made in animal social biology. Traditionally, neo-Darwinian theories of evolution concentrate on ‘fitness’ or an organism’s capacity to survive and reproduce in its own environmental niche. However, this process also relies on underlying signs and sign processes, which are often over-looked in traditional ethology and behavioural ecology. Biosemiotics, however, places the emphasis on sign process, with signs and signals comprising a semiosphere. Significantly, whilst the semiosphere is formulated as physical phenomena, specifically energetic and material signs which can be detected and transmitted as signals from one individual to another, it is the Umwelten of living organisms which give those signals meaning. Further, two or more Umwelten can merge, giving rise to a ‘Total Umwelt’, which facilitates shared meaning of signs between two or more individuals. Across and within generations, this gives rise to cultural interpretation of signs within populations. I argue this is the fundamental basis for emergent group properties in social species, or indeed in solitary living species where individuals interact to mate, defend territories or resources, or in raising altricial young. I therefore discuss a fusion of traditional behavioural ecology- based theory with semiotics, to examine the phenomenon of ‘shared meaning’ in animal social groups.

Loneliness and lost community in scenes of elderly care

Transformations in elderly care in the Nordic welfare states have influenced the lives of very old and terminally ill citizens remarkably. The retrenchment of welfare provision has included more home-based care, less institutional care and less help for everyday living, and it has increased solitary living. Neoliberal ideals of autonomous living and individual choice have become dominant values for the organisation of the care and treatment of very old and terminally ill patients. This article looks at how care professionals and care practices have been affected. The psychosocial perspective (Lorenzer, 1986; Leithäuser, 2019) presented is that human beings experience the collective human condition in relations, and the emotions and fantasies about the life of self and others are active in forming practice. A scenic understanding is the central methodology of the article, to identify how care professionals act in reality-oriented ways, while at the same time being involved with their senses, fantasising and anticipating the life of self and others. The analysis looks at how the loneliness and precarious situation of the patients create projections of fear, aggression and loneliness in care workers, which in turn affects the relationship professionals have with citizens, and the meaning of work. The identifications and fantasies of professionals also demonstrate longing for community in very old age, and generate utopian visions about elderly care in the professional communities of practice.