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Loneliness effects on selective attention to emotional faces

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Adriana Patrizia González Pizzio^1,2 (), Anna Pecchinenda²; ¹Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, Madrid, ²Università La Sapienza, Roma

Loneliness has been posited to bias attention toward social threat (e.g., Nezlek et al., 2015) or toward affiliative cues that may restore belonging (e.g., Cacioppo, Cacioppo, & Boomsma, 2014). We examined whether self-reported loneliness affects selective attention to emotional stimuli using a face-word interference task, in which distractor faces can capture processing through affective salience (Yantis & Jonides, 1990; Beall & Herbert, 2008). Ninety-seven university students were classified into low- and high-loneliness groups using the UCLA Loneliness Scale (Boffo, Mannarini & Munari, 2012) and the Interpersonal Acceptance–Rejection Loneliness Scale (Senese et al., 2021). A face-word interference task was employed, wherein participants categorized positive and negative words superimposed on distractor-faces displaying happy, angry, or scrambled (neutral) expressions. Task performance was assessed via reaction times (RTs) and response accuracy to examine interference and facilitation effects. Consistent with prioritized processing of threat (Öhman & Mineka, 2001), results evidence that emotional distractors reliably influenced performance: responses were faster to positive than to negative words, and angry faces elicited greater interference than happy or scrambled faces. Contrary to hypotheses, loneliness did not significantly modulate RT-based interference or facilitation. Accuracy paralleled the RT pattern; however, with IPARLS, the low-loneliness group was more accurate for positive than for negative words, whereas the high-loneliness group showed no such difference. This divergence between general loneliness (UCLA) and rejection-related loneliness (IPARLS) hints at context-specific influences of loneliness on emotional attention. Overall, loneliness did not robustly alter selective attention to emotional faces, while subtle accuracy effects suggest measurement nuance matters.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotional responding