Loneliness does not affect social attention to emotional faces

Loneliness stems from the perceived lack of meaningful social connections, and it can motivate toward signals of social affiliation, or to avoid them to shield oneself from further rejections. Loneliness also affects processing the direction of eye gaze in others, but it is unclear whether how it affects joint attention. Here we used the gaze cueing task, assessing gaze following and joint attention, to investigate whether individuals with high perceived loneliness shift their attention based on the gaze direction of neutral and emotional faces. Participants also completed an incidental face recognition task to assess their recognition memory for faces of individuals with whom they shared their attention. Findings showed similar gaze cueing effects and similar recognition memory for participants with low and high perceived loneliness. These findings indicate that perceived loneliness does not affect joint attention and the ability to recognition the faces of individuals with whom individuals shared their attentional focus.