Examining the visual processing patterns of lonely adults

Abstract

Prior research has shown that loneliness is associated with hypervigilance to social threats, with eye-tracking research showing lonely people display a specific attentional bias when viewing social rejection and social exclusion video footage (Bangee, Harris, Bridges, Rotenberg & Qualter, 2014; Qualter, Rotenberg, Barrett et al., 2013). The current study uses eye-tracker methodology to examine whether that attentional bias extends to negative emotional faces and negative social non-rejecting stimuli, or whether it could be explained only as a specific bias to social rejection/exclusion. It is important to establish whether loneliness relates to a specific or general attention bias because it may explain the maintenance of loneliness. Participants (N = 43, F = 35, Mage = 20 years and 2 months, SD = 3 months) took part in three tasks, where they viewed different social information: Task 1 - slides displaying four faces each with different emotions (anger, afraid, happy and neutral), Task 2 - slides displaying sixteen faces with varying ratios expressing happiness and anger, and Task 3 - slides displaying four visual scenes (socially rejecting, physically threatening, socially positive, neutral). For all three tasks, eye movements were recorded in real time with an eye-tracker. Results showed no association between loneliness and viewing patterns of facial expressions, but an association between loneliness and hypervigilant viewing of social rejecting stimuli. The findings indicate that lonely adults do not have a generalised hypervigilance to social threat, but have, instead, a specific attentional bias to rejection information in social contexts. Implications of the findings for interventions are discussed.

The Neurobiology of Social Distance

“…Both limited social stimulation and weakening social reflection capacities relate to the sense of loneliness in complex and important ways [13]. Once lonely, bias for negative information processing of cues from others hinders social rehabilitation in a downward cycle [4,183]. Many recent studies have corroborated the corpus of empirical evidence that feelings of loneliness escalate the risk of certain neurological diseases in later life, especially Alzheimer's disease [49].…”

Community identification, social support, and loneliness: The benefits of social identification for personal well‐being

“…The Hypervigilance to Social Threat hypothesis proposes that loneliness activates the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis (Bangee, Harris, Bridges, Rotenberg, & Qualter, 2014 ; Qualter et al., 2013 ). For lonely individuals, this hypervigilance is specifically for identifying and attending to social threats whereby they are predisposed to interpret ambiguous social stimuli as threatening (Bangee & Qualter, 2018 ).…”

Loneliness Modulates Automatic Attention to Warm and Competent Faces: Preliminary Evidence From an Eye-Tracking Study

“…Loneliness is the negative experience of a discrepancy between the desired and achieved personal network of relationships (Maner et al, 2007;de Jong Gierveld et al, 2016) and is related to negative emotional experiences (Hawkley and Cacioppo, 2010). Many studies have demonstrated that loneliness increases attention to social information, especially social threads, using various experimental methodologies such as electroencephalogram (Cacioppo et al, 2015(Cacioppo et al, , 2016 and eyetracking (Bangee et al, 2014). Additionally, it is known that loneliness causes hypervigilance to visual cues about social information (e.g., Bangee et al, 2014) as well as auditory cues about social information (i.e., voice, Shin and Kim, 2019).…”

“…Many studies have demonstrated that loneliness increases attention to social information, especially social threads, using various experimental methodologies such as electroencephalogram (Cacioppo et al, 2015(Cacioppo et al, , 2016 and eyetracking (Bangee et al, 2014). Additionally, it is known that loneliness causes hypervigilance to visual cues about social information (e.g., Bangee et al, 2014) as well as auditory cues about social information (i.e., voice, Shin and Kim, 2019). Although it seems obvious that loneliness increases attention to social stimuli, the effects of loneliness on automatic visual attention to social information remain unclear.…”

“…Although it seems obvious that loneliness increases attention to social stimuli, the effects of loneliness on automatic visual attention to social information remain unclear. The abovementioned studies have addressed these effects on selective attention using Stroop (Cacioppo et al, 2015(Cacioppo et al, , 2016Shin and Kim, 2019) and free-viewing (Bangee et al, 2014) tasks. However, other studies investigating the effects of loneliness on attention only measured voluntary attention (Gardner et al, 2005;Lodder et al, 2016) because the participants consciously paid attention to social information.…”