Loneliness and the recognition of vocal socioemotional expressions in adolescence

ABSTRACT

Lonely individuals show increased social monitoring and heightened recognition of negative facial expressions. The current study investigated whether this pattern extends to other nonverbal modalities by examining associations between loneliness and the recognition of vocal emotional expressions. Youth, ages 11–18 years (n = 122), were asked to identify the intended emotion in auditory portrayals of basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) and social expressions (friendliness, meanness). Controlling for social anxiety, age, and gender, links between loneliness and recognition accuracy were emotion-specific: loneliness was associated with poorer recognition of fear, but better recognition of friendliness. Lonely individuals’ motivation to avoid threat may interfere with the recognition of fear, but their attunement to affiliative cues may promote the identification of friendliness in affective prosody. Monitoring for social affiliation cues in others’ voices might represent an adaptive function of the reconnection system in lonely youth, and be a worthy target for intervention.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion recognition
• affective prosody
• vocal communication
• social monitoring
• social information processing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Raw accuracy estimates for each emotion are provided in Supplemental Materials, Table 1.

2 To verify the robustness of our findings, additional models were performed (a) without social anxiety as a covariate, (b) including the age of the speaker as a predictor, and (c) using uncorrected estimates of accuracy instead of H_u as the measure of performance. Results are identical to those presented in text (see Supplemental Materials, Tables 2–4), with the following exceptions: loneliness is not associated with the recognition of fear when social anxiety is removed as a covariate, and age is not associated with the recognition of fear when uncorrected estimates of accuracy are used instead of H_u.