Spithoven, Bijttebier (2017). It is all in their mind: A review on information processing bias in lonely individuals.

Question 1

negative cognitive biases lonely people have

Answer 1

• increased attention for social threatening stimuli
• hold negative and hostile intent attributions
• expect rejection
• evaluate themselves and others negatively
• endorse less promotion- and more prevention-oriented goals
• have a low self-efficacy.

Question 2

While most people experience temporary loneliness (=transient loneliness) linked to specific life events, a smaller group faces chronic loneliness unrelated to particular events.

Answer 2

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Question 3

Evolutionary perspective on loneliness:

Answer 3

suggests that social relationships are crucial for survival and reproduction. This suggests that loneliness might have had an adaptive purpose by promoting social contacts. However, prolonged experience of loneliness is associated with adverse effects on both physical and mental well-being.

Question 4

duidelijke uitleg hoe negatieve cognitieve biases zelfvervullend zijn

Answer 4

Loneliness makes people more sensitive to social threats. This affects how they notice, understand, and remember social situations, pushing them to address these negative feelings (of perceived social threat). Focusing on both positive and negative social cues helps lonely individuals create a strategy to maximize positive experiences and minimize negative ones. But this strategy in activating cognitive processes is actually maladaptive!

Question 5

social information processing model onderdelen

Answer 5

• encoding of cues: faster attentional focus on social threats, increased sensitivity and accuracy in emotion recognition
• interpretation: expect rejection, self-defeating attribution style, negative self and other evaluation
• clarfication of goals: increased prevention goals, no effect on promotion goals
• response access and decision: low social efficacy, no effect on response repertoire
• behavioural enactment: confirmatory behaviours, reconnecting behaviours
• memory

zie schrift

Question 6

hypervigilance=

Answer 6

involves a broad initial attention to constantly scan the environment, followed by a focused attention on any detected socially threatening cues.

Question 7

study on attention in lonely individuals

Answer 7

Eye-tracking studies during movie clips show that lonely individuals fixate faster on threatening social stimuli.
However, in still images of emotions displayed for 5 seconds, lonely individuals did not differ from non-lonely individuals.
This suggest hypervigilance may be specific to explicit social threatening stimuli (1st study) instead of just negative stimuli (2nd study).

EEG recordings also show that lonely individuals demonstrate faster differentiation between social threats and non-social threats in brain responses compared to non-lonely individuals.

Question 8

As is explained in the model, there should be an increased sensitivity and accuracy for emotion recognition in loneliness.
However, there’s limited evidence supporting this.
Research shows that lonely individuals and non-lonely individuals are equally able in inferring emotions from facial expressions, suggesting they’re equally able at adjusting their behavior based on others’ emotions.

Answer 8

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Question 9

interpretation of cues

Answer 9

Due to a perceived social world as threatening and prone to isolation, lonely individuals are more likely to interpret neutral or ambiguous social stimuli as threatening. They anticipate rejection and expect harm from others, attributing hostile intentions. This negative interpretation extends to self-perception, with lonely individuals rating their characteristics and skills more negatively than others.

• rejection expectation
• attributions
• evaluations of self and others

Question 10

rejection expectation=

Answer 10

Loneliness predicts heightened expectations of anxious and angry rejection in the future. These expectations, in turn, contribute to increased loneliness (bidirectional relationship).

Question 11

Lonely individuals frequently expect rejection and exclusion, commonly assessed using the….

Answer 11

Rejection Sensitivity (RS) paradigm

Question 12

2 key types of attributions

Answer 12

1. attributions regarding intent (hostile intentions, especially in social events)
2. attributions regarding causality (self-defeating attributional style where negative social events are attributed to stable, internal and uncontrollable factors, and positive events the other way around)

Question 13

Loneliness is related to negative evaluations of others in terms of…

Answer 13

• trustworthiness,
• communicative competence,
• supportiveness,
• attractiveness,
• social desirableness

Question 14

goal clarification: 2 types of goals

Answer 14

• approach goals: aim at seeking satisfying relationships by initiating interactions
• avoidance goals: focus on protecting against rejection by displaying cautious behaviors

Question 15

response access and decision

Answer 15

Individuals consider various actions in response to social situations. The decision about which response to choose is influenced by how they interpret stimuli, their goals, available responses, and their belief in the effectiveness of their chosen response (self-efficacy). Lonely individuals generally don’t possess different response repertoires compared to non-lonely individuals. Loneliness consistently correlates with lower social self-efficacy, indicating that lonely individuals typically lack confidence in their ability to positively impact their social situations

Question 16

behavioural enactment

Answer 16

• Engaging (reconnecting) behavior: Socially awkward or inappropriate behaviors (due to less social competence and skills)
• Disengaging (confirmatory) behavior: Withdrawal behaviors (cannot practice social skills this way)

Question 17

memory and loneliness

Answer 17

A study shows that loneliness correlates with better recall of both positive and negative social events. -> Consistent with the model, which states that loneliness is associated with an increased focus on social information overall.

Another study shows that loneliness relates to increased false memories and poorer academic performance. -> focus on social information impairs non-social memory abilities

Question 18

Loneliness correlates with a negative cognitive bias across all stages of information processing.
While the loneliness model suggests that cognitive bias results from loneliness, evidence suggests that the bias precedes loneliness, serving as both a vulnerability and a maintaining factor.

Answer 18

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