Abstract
Social connections are essential for human survival. Loneliness is a motivational factor for building and maintaining social connections. Automatic attention occurs with little cognitive effort and plays a key role in detecting biologically salient events, such as human faces. Although previous studies have investigated the effect of loneliness on social behavior, the effect of loneliness on automatic attention to human faces remains largely unknown. The present study investigated the effects of loneliness on automatic visual attention to warmth and competence facial information, which determines facial attraction. This study included 43 participants who rated warmth and competence facial information. Then, they engaged with the target-distractor paradigm in which they saw two house images at the top and bottom and indicated whether the images were identical. During the task, we presented two faces as distractors and measured visual attention toward the faces as automatic attention because participants did not have to attend to the faces. The results showed an interactive effect between subjective loneliness and facial information on automatic attention. Warm targets automatically captured the attention of people feeling relatively lonely, whereas competent targets automatically captured the attention of those who felt less lonely. These results suggest that loneliness adaptively influences automatic processing of social information.
Highlights
Automatic attention is an adaptive tool for detecting and enhancing processing of salient events from an evolutionary perspective
A generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) analysis was conducted to assess the effects of perceived traits and subjective loneliness on automatic attention
This result indicates that loneliness did not promote automatic attention to faces regardless of the facial information, so the first hypothesis positing that people feeling relatively lonely would pay more automatic attention to faces, as compared to those who are less lonely was not supported
Summary
Automatic attention is an adaptive tool for detecting and enhancing processing of salient events from an evolutionary perspective. Given the unique role that automatic attention plays in adaptive behaviors (Carretié, 2014), it is important to examine whether loneliness would influence automatic visual attention to social information, such as faces. The present study investigated the effects of loneliness on automatic visual attention to faces because faces contain important social information. No studies have investigated whether loneliness modulates automatic attention to faces based on the two fundamental dimensions of facial evaluation (i.e., warmth and competence). Self-esteem and low anxiety levels are both positively correlated with the need for cognition and correlated with low levels of loneliness (Al Khatib, 2012; Lim et al, 2016) These findings suggest that less lonely people seek competence rather than warmth in others. The second hypothesis is that the degree of loneliness modulates the extent of automatic attention; a greater degree of loneliness promotes automatic attention to warm faces whereas a lesser degree of loneliness promotes automatic attention to competent faces
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