CHICAGO (Reuters) – People who are lonely may be more likely to have sleepless nights, researchers said in a study that suggests loneliness may not only cause unhappiness but may be bad for your health.

Reporting in the journal Sleep, Lianne Kurina of the University of Chicago and colleagues studied loneliness and sleep patterns among a group of older residents living in two colonies of Hutterites in South Dakota.

People in this religious sect live communally, sharing possessions and meals. They are rarely socially isolated.

She said the findings were similar to those from a 2002 study of college students that compared feelings of loneliness to sleep quality. It found that the lonelier the students felt, the more fitfully they slept.

The researchers collected information on feelings of loneliness, blood pressure and sleep from 95 residents of the Hutterite communities.

To measure sleep, study volunteers wore wrist bands that measured their activity and level of restlessness during sleep.

Among the residents, roughly half said they were not lonely. But among the remaining half, the researchers noted a trend between increasing feelings of loneliness and social isolation and more fitful sleep.

“Basically, the lonelier individuals had sleep that was more broken up. There was more movement during the night, more periods of short sleep duration, more tossing and turning,” Kurina said by phone.

Kurina said her study does not prove that loneliness causes sleepless nights. Instead, it may help to explain why loneliness has been associated with poor health.

“It’s evidence of one way in which feelings of loneliness might get into the body” and affect health, she said.

Jilted fiancée to get compensation

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – A court has ordered a Brazilian man to pay $6,500 for saying “I don’t” to his former fiancee.

Rio de Janeiro state Judge Benedicto Abicair said Marcelo de Azevedo Fernandes must pay for “moral and material” damages to Cristiane Costa de Andrade. The ruling was posted Friday on the court’s website.

The couple was to have been married in September of 2007, but Fernandes called it off.

The judge said in his ruling that Andrade’s “suffering, anguish and humiliation cannot be ignored.”

The fine is supposed to pay for the jilted woman’s wedding costs and visits to a psychologist.

Andrade’s lawyer, Viviane Sines del Giudice, said neither she nor her client would make any immediate comment regarding the case. Calls to Fernandes’ attorney, Fabiano Ayupp Magalhaes, went unanswered.

The O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper reported there have been at least two similar cases since 2004. In that year, a judge in the state of Sao Paulo ordered a man to pay his fiancee $4,500 for getting cold feet days before the weddings. A year later, a woman in Rio de Janeiro state received $2,000 after her fiance decided not to get married 75 days before the wedding.

Vatican wants sermons spiced up

ROME (AFP) – The Vatican’s top cultural official hit out at sermons he said were too often dreary and bland and urged Catholic priests not to shy away from spicing up their preaching.

Speaking at a conference organized by a French institute, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi said preaching in churches “was so dull and vapid that it had become quite meaningless.”

To yank drowsy church-goers to attention, the Italian cardinal urged priests to jazz up their vocabulary and not be afraid of letting the “scandal” contained in the Bible erupt from the pulpit.

Ravasi argued that priests needed to be in sync with their time and adapt to a high-paced, tech-savvy world.

“The advent of televised and computerized information requires us to be compelling and trenchant, to cut to the heart of the matter, resort to narratives and color,” he said.

He praised micro-blogging site Twitter as a tool that “forces to deliver something in a flash, something primal.”