During the teenage years, adolescents typically begin forming complex social networks and spending more time with friends than with their parents. However, not all teenagers experience the same level of social connection at this age. Feelings of loneliness can be hard to manage, and may impact the way in which teenagers interpret social information. Previous research has shown that lonely individuals are highly attuned to social information, including both cues of social threat and signals of affiliation. Relatedly, loneliness has been linked to better recognition of negative emotions conveyed by others’ facial expressions. However, little is known about whether loneliness has similar associations with the interpretation of non-facial information, such as others’ tone of voice. To answer this question, we asked 11- to 18-year-old adolescents to report on their feelings of loneliness and to complete a vocal emotion recognition task, in which they were asked to select the emotion they thought was being conveyed in recordings of emotional voices. Contrary to our expectations, we found that loneliness was linked to poorer recognition of fear (a negative emotion), but better recognition of friendliness (an affiliative expression), in others’ voices. We speculated that differences from previous findings may stem from the differential timecourse over which vocal emotion unfolds: though negative cues may initially grab listeners’ attention, lonely individuals’ tendency to avoid threat may interfere with their accurate interpretation of this type of social cue. This work provides some evidence that youth’s cognitive response to social information is likely relevant to their social experiences, but highlights the importance of extending our assessment of social information processing to non-facial modalities.
More details about this work can be found here: https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2019.1682971
Morningstar, M., Nowland, R., Dirks, M.A., & Qualter, P. (2019). Links between feelings of loneliness and the recognition of vocal socio-emotional expressions in adolescents. Cognition & Emotion. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2019.1682971