Helping the heart grow fonder during absence: Daydreaming about significant others replenishes connectedness after induced loneliness

Abstract

People are known to engage in behaviours aimed at replenishing social connectedness after their sense of belonging is threatened. We explored whether the mental strategy of daydreaming about significant others could have similar effects by acting as an imaginary substitute when loved ones are unavailable. Following a loneliness induction, participants (N = 126) were asked to either daydream about a significant other, daydream about a non-social scenario or complete a control task. Social daydreamers showed significantly increased feelings of connection, love and belonging compared to non-social daydreamers and control participants. Consistent with the proposition that social daydreaming replenished connectedness, social daydreamers also behaved more pro-socially and expressed less of a desire to interact with others after daydreaming. These findings demonstrate that through imagination, social daydreaming can replenish connectedness providing a potential strategy for enhancing socio-emotional well-being.

Keywords:

• Daydreaming
• Mind wandering
• Loneliness
• Belonging Regulation
• Imagination

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Helping behaviour may sometimes be regarded as a form of social interaction and so might repair feelings of disconnection. However, in the present study, participants completed a helping request that was directed towards future helping behaviour and would not have involved social contact (coding data) suggesting that offers to help are less likely to be construed as a form of social interaction that might foster connectedness.

² Participants who offered to code a range of sheets (e.g. 5–10) were given the mid-way point as their value (e.g. 7.5). Two participants offered to help but could not give an exact value and were excluded from analyses. Four participants offered to code a maximum number of sheets rather than specifying the number (e.g. “as many as possible”). These participants (one each in the social-daydreaming and pleasant-daydreaming conditions and two in the control condition) were given the maximum value of their condition. One participant in the social-daydreaming condition who offered to code 100 sheets was excluded from analyses as an outlier (> 2SD above the mean).

³ Feelings of loneliness, social disconnection and negative affect were all significantly positively skewed. We attempted to transform these variables but no transformation was able to adequately normalise the distribution. Although we report parametric tests for these variables for consistency, non-parametric tests produced equivalent results and are available on request. Seventeen participants expressed suspicion that the ostensibly valid loneliness scale used for the loneliness induction was not an accurate measure of loneliness. We re-ran analyses excluding these participants: results and conclusions were unaffected.

⁴ We failed to find evidence that the effect of social daydreaming on helping was mediated by feelings of social connection (results available on request). Although we found that social daydreamers helped more than other participants, this was not due to increased positive social feelings.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES-J500215-1].