Social context and loneliness in an epidemiological youth sample using the Experience Sampling Method

The positive and negative emotion functions related to loneliness: a systematic review of behavioural and neuroimaging studies

“…A total of 10 studies investigated the association between loneliness and positive emotions. Among these, one study was conducted in adolescents (Baytemir and Yildiz, 2017 ), four studies were conducted in young adults (Durak and Senol-Durak, 2010 ; Ditcheva et al ., 2018 ; Satici 2019 ; Tang et al ., 2022 ), one was conducted in middle-aged adults (Ben-Zur 2012 ), and four were conducted in older adults (Steptoe et al ., 2011 ; Neto 2014 ; Davidson et al ., 2022 ; Donizzetti and Capone 2023 ). All 10 studies reported a negative relationship between loneliness and positive emotion among healthy individuals, although one study additionally found that this relationship may be reversed following social stress (as detailed next).…”

Threatened by others or by everything? The effects of momentary and trait loneliness on daily appraisals of social company and being alone in young adults

“…Three participants were excluded, two of them due to completing less than 70% of entries (less than 44 prompts) and one not completing all the questionnaires required in the study which resulted in the final sample of 64 participants. Similar to some previous studies (Cacioppo et al, 2002; Tang et al, 2022), the remaining sample was divided into 32 LI (18 females) and 32 NLI (15 females) based on a median split (i.e. 38 points on the R‐UCLA scale).…”

“…While in most of the previous studies, momentary affective changes were treated as dependent variables that may be predicted by social appraisals or social context (Tang et al, 2022; van Roekel et al, 2014, 2018), according to the ETL, the reverse could also be true—loneliness should influence how we perceive others. Indeed, it has been empirically demonstrated that momentary loneliness and negative affect were linked with increased negativity of social appraisals (van Winkel et al, 2017), threat beliefs (Krkovic et al, 2018), and paranoia (Bell et al, 2023).…”

“…At the same time, the ETL posits that the two types of loneliness may have different effects on behavioural and affective responses or interact with each other (Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2018), and thus, the simultaneous investigation of both levels is necessary to understand their precise mechanisms. For example, trait loneliness has been associated with feeling more lonely when being alone than when being with close others (Tang et al, 2022; van Roekel et al, 2018). Trait loneliness has also been shown to moderate the relationship between state loneliness and physiological activity (Roddick & Chen, 2021) and to reduce prosocial behaviour in older adults experiencing transient loneliness (Archer Lee et al, 2022).…”

“…While a body of laboratory research provided evidence that the effects of loneliness are specific to social context (Spithoven et al, 2017), many previous ESM studies on appraisals measured them mainly in the presence of other people, and not during solitary situations. While the focus on social context can be understood in the light of the ETL, which posits that loneliness should primarily affect the perception of social cues, it limits the possibility of inferring whether negative appraisals are exclusive to social situations or domain independent (Krkovic et al, 2018; Tang et al, 2022; van Roekel et al, 2014, 2018; van Winkel et al, 2017). However, some research demonstrated that loneliness could have a more general impact on negativity bias.…”