A recent eye-tracking study found differences in the way lonely versus non-lonely individuals automatically attend to faces. It was found that lonely individuals paid more attention to faces they deemed “warm”, while less lonely individuals paid more attention to faces deemed “competent.” These findings come from a study published in Frontiers in Psychology.
As the study authors note, previous research shows that lonely people display heightened attention to social information. Much of this research has focused on voluntary attention, showing that lonely individuals consciously attend to social information, but it is unclear whether this process works automatically as well. “Given the unique role that automatic attention plays in adaptive behaviors (Carretié, 2014),” Saito and colleagues say, “it is important to examine whether loneliness would also influence automatic visual attention to social information, such as faces.”
Since research shows that people tend to gauge faces based on the aspects of warmth and competence, the authors reason that these two elements might influence automatic attention to faces, depending on a person’s level of loneliness.
An eye-tracking study was conducted with 43 university students who took part in a target-distractor paradigm. In each trial, students were shown two house images, one at the top of the screen and one at the bottom, and asked to indicate whether the images were the same or different. Each round also included two face images, situated at the left and right of the screen as distractors.
Subjects completed 80 trials, and were exposed to 20 faces in each of the categories of “warm and competent, warm but incompetent, cold but competent, cold and incompetent.” Eye-tracking measured fixation time on the faces and all participants completed the UCLA Loneliness Scale.
Results showed that participants classified as “relatively lonely” showed automatic attention towards the warm faces, whereas the “less lonely” participants did not. The authors suggest that this demonstrates that the tendency of lonely individuals to pay attention to social stimuli can occur automatically.
To possibly explain how this happens, the authors refer to Kruglanski et al.’s (2002) goal systems framework, which suggests that the activation of a goal can evoke changes in behavior, even unconsciously. By this reasoning, the authors suggest that “the goal of the lonelier participants in our study was to connect with people they perceived as warm.”
Results further showed that those who were less lonely automatically attended to competent faces, whereas the relatively lonely group did not. The authors suggest that “the goal of less lonely participants may have been to acquire a higher status…for these participants, directing their gaze toward competent faces is a useful strategy because building a good relationship with a higher status person may raise one’s own status.”
While the analysis found a main effect for warmth on automatic attention, the same effect was not found for competence. This was consistent with some previous studies which have suggested that warmth information takes precedence over information about competence. Still, the current study did find that loneliness modulated attention to warm and competent faces and the authors suggest that “although warmth information was more important in general, the importance of warmth and competence information might depend on an individual’s state, such as loneliness, in some cases.”
The authors conclude that their study “suggests that saliency of social stimuli is dependent on an individuals’ state, such as feeling lonely.” They suggest that future experimental studies attempt to use a manipulation of loneliness in order to explore causality within this relationship.
The study, “Loneliness Modulates Automatic Attention to Warm and Competent Faces: Preliminary Evidence From an Eye-Tracking Study”, was authored by Toshiki Saito, Kosuke Motoki, Rui Nouchi, Ryuta Kawashima, and Motoaki Sugiura.