Parental Loneliness and Choking Under Social Pressure in Children and Adolescents

Even if lonely people possess good social skills, anxiety-provoking situations can impair their performance in social tasks. The aim of the current study was to investigate how parental-related loneliness may be linked to choking under social pressure in children and adolescents, considering both the performance in an emotion recognition task and the subjective experiences of participants – including emotional, cognitive, and physiological anxiety, as well as perceived competence. To date, no study has examined the hypothesis of “choking under social pressure” in Italian children and adolescents, nor the link between parental-related loneliness and emotion recognition. The study involved 150 participants (54% girls) aged 9 to 16 from middle-class families living in urban areas of north-east Italy and tested at school. A cross-sectional study with an experimental within-subjects design was conducted. Participants completed a parental-related loneliness scale and a computerized emotion recognition task divided into two conditions: one without (baseline) and one with social pressure (social framing). Self-reported measures of anxiety (emotional, cognitive, physiological) and perceived competence were collected after each condition through questionnaires. Linear mixed-effects models showed that higher parental-related loneliness was associated with poorer performance in the social framing condition, suggesting that emotional disconnection from parents may be linked to vulnerability under pressure. In addition, greater physiological anxiety and lower perceived competence were related to higher parental loneliness in the social framing condition. Neither anxiety nor perceived competence were significant mediators of the relationship between loneliness and emotion recognition performance under social pressure. These findings carry practical implications for supporting socially vulnerable children and adolescents in high-pressure contexts, by highlighting the need for interventions targeting parent-related loneliness and self-regulatory skills.