ABSTRACT
The importance of social contact has long been recognized, as seen in the use of solitary confinement for purposes of punishment and voluntary isolation for religious meditation. However, social isolation per se has only become of major interest to psychologists within the last two decades. Most isolation and confinement situations involve a degree of stimulus reduction that many individuals find disturbing. Intellectual or complex psychomotor performance in these simulator studies is relatively unaffected by confinement per se, although it is significantly impaired by sensory or perceptual isolation. The indirect evidence, however, supports the hypothesis that social isolation is by itself a significantly stressful condition for at least a substantial number of people, and that the reactions to it are distinguishable from those to confinement and stimulus reduction. Many of the studies of military crews assigned to isolation and confinement situations have been primarily concerned with performance effects of such conditions.
