Be nice and gently welcoming to the curmudgeons you meet. Invite them to share coffee. Don’t push for reciprocal invitations, perhaps. And if you happen to be the curmudgeon, accept that invitation. It isn’t coming from a predator out to devour you. The lonelier you are, the more your attention is drawn toward negative social information, says one of the researchers, John Cacioppo, whose colleague and wife, Stephanie, led the study, which appeared in the journal Cortex. Lonely people seemed inadvertently hypervigilant to social threats. To read more, click here.