State loneliness is associated with emotional hypervigilance in daily life: A network analysis

Abstract

Loneliness is associated with many physical and mental health problems, but the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Studies on trait loneliness have found evidence supporting the hypothesis that loneliness is associated with hypervigilance for social threats. However, few studies have examined this hypothesis with state loneliness. This study aims at testing the hypervigilance hypothesis of loneliness by examining the temporal dynamics between state loneliness and the momentary affect in daily life. We measured state loneliness and momentary positive and negative affect in 211 college students over a period of 13 days, using the experience sampling method. The network analysis revealed that state loneliness has a strong autoregressive effect and is positively correlated to sadness, fear, alertness, and hostility in the temporal and contemporaneous networks. In the temporal network, state loneliness formed mutually reinforced feedback loops with the feelings of alertness and hostility. The between-subject network suggested that the feeling of fear mediated the connections between loneliness and alertness, hostility, and anxiety. The centrality analysis showed that loneliness has a high strength centrality in the temporal and contemporaneous networks. These findings demonstrate how state loneliness interacted with momentary affect in daily life, indicating its association with emotional hypervigilance.