Attentional Bias Towards Interpersonal Evaluation Information In Individuals With Different Levels Of Loneliness

Loneliness is widespread in the modern society and affects the mental health of individual, it’s a bad emotional experience caused by the differences between expectation and actual social relations. A lot of research on loneliness is mainly from three dimensions, including cognition, emotion and behavior. Foreign researches had been focused on the mechanism of emotion and information processing strategies and attentional bias in social cognition. However, it remained controversial in some studies of cognitive processing mechanism which concentrated on the loneliness individual. For example, some researchers believed that it made no significant difference in loneliness participants when distinguishing between emotional faces. Others also noted that when loneliness individuals looking at negative social images, the related visual cortex would be activated. Selective attention was considered as the cognitive mechanism that social perception could be turned into action, therefore, it was necessary to discuss loneliness individuals’coping strategies from different perspective of attention processing.This research attempts to explore whether the different attentional bias caused by person with different levels of loneliness will be showed in the social evaluation information (refusal or acceptance of the face). And what is the specific mechanism if loneliness individuals showing different attentional bias towards social evaluation information. Then distinguish the particular attentional bias component.In this research, we used the emotional facial pictures as social evaluation information. For example, we used happy feces pictures as social accepted information and anger/disgust faces as social rejected information. In the first Experiment, we preliminary explored the attentional bias differences with different levies of loneliness individuals towards social evaluative information through classic emotional stroop paradigm. Results showed that high loneliness individuals showed attentional bias towards social rejected information (angry/disgust faces). However, the low loneliness individuals showed attentional bias towards social accepted information (happy faces). Then we used another paradigm measuring attentional bias-the improved classic point detection paradigm to test the attentional bias of loneliness participants again, trying to obtain re-verification of the former experimental results. Meanwhile, this method could found the mechanisms and components of attentional bias by adding the neutral pictures pairs through the differences between the neutral experimental reaction and the consistent reaction or between the neutral reaction and the inconsistent reaction. Its reasoning logic was that if the neutral experiment reaction time was less than the inconsistent reaction time, then it is hard to disengage the attentional component. If the neutral pairs was greater than the consistent experimental reaction time, then the attentional component was speeded detection. If the neutral pairs was less than the consistent reaction time or the neutral pairs was greater than the inconsistent experimental reaction time, then the attentional component was quick avoidance. The second experiment validated the first experiment’s results, and it also identified the particular components of attentional bias. To be specific, high loneliness individuals had attentional bias towards social rejected information (angry/disgust faces) and the attentional bias component was difficulty to disengage, because the neutral pairs was significantly shorter than inconsistent reaction time. Low loneliness individuals had the same attentional bias towards social accepted information (happy feces) and the component was also difficulty to disengage, because the neutral pairs was shorter than inconsistent reaction time. This study had some practical significance through the statistical analysis, it can not only provide inspiration for the study of loneliness, but also giving some advice for mental health education.