Exploring the Relationship Between Loneliness and Social Cognition in Older Age

Abstract

Abstract. Understanding others is a key component of successful social interactions, and declines in social abilities during later life can lead to social isolation and loneliness. We investigated the relationship between different subcomponents of social cognition and loneliness in a large sample of older adults. We tested perspective-taking and mentalizing skills, alongside self-reported loneliness and social functioning. The results revealed that both loneliness and age correlated significantly with older adults' ability to resist egocentric interference when taking others' perspectives. However, mediation models showed that the effect of loneliness on egocentric tendencies was eliminated when age was accounted for. Therefore, loneliness relates to egocentrism only because egocentric tendencies increase with age, and people experience increasing levels of loneliness and feelings of social isolation with increasing age. Mentalizing and interference from others' perspectives were not influenced by loneliness or age.

Loneliness is associated with greater cognitive distance between the self and a close friend

“…Overall, the increased cognitive distance between self and friend in individuals who often experience loneliness provides further evidence that social connection can be reflected at the cognitive level (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009;Courtney & Meyer, 2020). For example, recently loneliness was associated with greater egocentricity during a visual perspective taking task (De Lillo et al, 2022), aligning with the greater egocentricity seen in several social cognitive tasks across several affective conditions (Bora et al, 2009;Bora & Berk, 2016;Erle et al, 2019;Pittelkow et al, 2021;Schreiter et al, 2013). The results of the current study should provide impetus for the study of such cognitive biases as a mediator or predictor of the development of affective conditions in those who experience chronic loneliness.…”

Loneliness is associated with a greater self‐reference effect in episodic memory when compared against a close friend

“…Self‐referential processing is relevant across many cognitive domains (Cunningham & Turk, 2017; Sui & Humphreys, 2015), although evidence suggests self‐biases are unique to each domain (Nijhof et al, 2020). An association between loneliness and egocentricity has been identified using a visual perspective taking paradigm (De Lillo et al, 2022), but further research is required to assess whether loneliness is associated with consistent or unique differences in self‐other processing across cognitive domains. Likewise, although we included depression in the present study, other individual differences such as anxiety and psychotic traits (Fung et al, 2017; Le et al, 2019) have been associated with loneliness and should be considered in future research.…”