Loneliness and Hypervigilance to Social Cues in Females: An Eye-Tracking Study

The goal of the present study was to examine whether lonely individuals differ from nonlonely individuals in their overt visual attention to social cues. Previous studies showed that loneliness was related to biased post-attentive processing of social cues (e.g., negative interpretation bias), but research on whether lonely and nonlonely individuals also show differences in an earlier information processing stage (gazing behavior) is very limited. A sample of 25 lonely and 25 nonlonely students took part in an eye-tracking study consisting of four tasks. We measured gazing (duration, number of fixations and first fixation) at the eyes, nose and mouth region of faces expressing emotions (Task 1), at emotion quadrants (anger, fear, happiness and neutral expression) (Task 2), at quadrants with positive and negative social and nonsocial images (Task 3), and at the facial area of actors in video clips with positive and negative content (Task 4). In general, participants tended to gaze most often and longest at areas that conveyed most social information, such as the eye region of the face (T1), and social images (T3). Participants gazed most often and longest at happy faces (T2) in still images, and more often and longer at the facial area in negative than in positive video clips (T4). No differences occurred between lonely and nonlonely participants in their gazing times and frequencies, nor at first fixations at social cues in the four different tasks. Based on this study, we found no evidence that overt visual attention to social cues differs between lonely and nonlonely individuals. This implies that biases in social information processing of lonely individuals may be limited to other phases of social information processing. Alternatively, biased overt attention to social cues may only occur under specific conditions, for specific stimuli or for specific lonely individuals.本研究旨在考察孤独个体与非孤独个体在对社交线索的外显视觉注意（overt visual attention）方面是否存在差异。此前已有研究表明，孤独感与社交线索的后注意加工（post-attentive processing）偏向（如负性解释偏向）相关，但针对孤独与非孤独个体在更早的信息加工阶段——凝视行为——是否存在差异的研究仍十分有限。本研究招募25名孤独学生与25名非孤独学生参与一项包含四项任务的眼动追踪（eye-tracking）实验。实验中，我们记录了被试的凝视数据，具体测量指标包括凝视时长、注视次数（fixations）与首次注视位置，刺激区域涵盖：表达情绪的面孔的眼部、鼻部与口部区域（任务1）、情绪象限（包含愤怒、恐惧、快乐与中性表情）（任务2）、带有正负性社交与非社交图像的象限（任务3），以及带有正负性内容的视频片段中演员的面部区域（任务4）。总体而言，被试更倾向于对携带最多社交信息的区域产生更频繁且更长时间的凝视，例如面孔的眼部区域（任务1）与社交图像（任务3）；被试对静态图像中的快乐面孔（任务2）的凝视最为频繁且时长最长，相较于积极视频片段，被试对消极视频片段中演员的面部区域的凝视次数更多、时长更长（任务4）。在四项任务中，孤独组与非孤独组被试在凝视时长、凝视频率，以及对社交线索的首次注视位置方面均未出现显著差异。基于本研究结果，我们未发现证据表明孤独个体与非孤独个体在对社交线索的外显视觉注意方面存在差异。这意味着孤独个体的社交信息加工偏向可能仅局限于社交信息加工的其他阶段；或者，对社交线索的外显注意偏向可能仅在特定条件下、针对特定刺激或特定孤独群体时才会出现。