Loneliness and Emotion Recognition: A Dynamical Description

Loneliness – the feeling that manifests when one perceives one’s social needs are
not being met by the quantity or especially the quality of one’s social relationships – is a
common but typically short-lived and fairly harmless experience. However, recent
research continues to uncover a variety of alarming health effects associated with longterm
loneliness. The present study examines the psychological mechanisms underlying
how persons scoring high in trait loneliness perceive their social environments.
Evaluations of transient facial expression morphs are analyzed in R using dynamical
systems methods. We hypothesize that, consistent with Cacioppo and Hawkley’s sociocognitive
model, subjects scoring high in loneliness will exhibit hypervigilance in their
evaluations of cold and neutral emotions and hypovigilance in their evaluations of warm
emotions. Results partially support the socio-cognitive model but point to a relationship
between loneliness and a global dampening in evaluations of emotions.
Keywords: loneliness, perceived social isolation, social dynamics, emotion recognition.