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Abstract:
Perceived social isolation (e.g., loneliness) is a major contributing factor to reduced well- being. Approximately 15-30% of people suffer from prolonged feelings of loneliness with severe implications for physical and mental
health. Previous work has theorized that loneliness arises as a warning signal to prompt individual to connect.
However, empirical evidence, especially in clinical psychology, suggests that loneliness decreases an
individual’s odds of being successfully embedded in a social group. Despite its essential social nature, little
experimental work has done to unearth the effects of loneliness on social behaviors and expectations. Across
different studies and with the help of different methodologies (e.g., survey data, economic games and
neuroimaging techniques), we investigated the effects of loneliness on socially-relevant expectations of others
and elucidated how these effects reverberate in the concomitant social behaviors. In particular, we focused on
trustworthiness expectations and trusting behaviors during interactive social paradigms. We show that loneliness
has positive effects on prosocial behaviors but negative effects on social expectations of others. Specifically,
lonelier individuals trusted more their partners despite expecting them to be less trustworthy. These effects were
mediated by extraversion, which mitigated the negative effects of loneliness on trustworthiness expectations. In
lonelier individuals, these effects were accompanied by a negative bias toward untrustworthy behaviors of others
and reduced neural activity in the orbitofrontal cortex for feedback about their trustworthy behavior. Taken
together, these findings demonstrate how loneliness operates and impacts social expectations, social behaviors
and their underlying neural, psychological and computational processes. As a result, this work will help
understand the early dynamics of different psychiatric conditions strongly predicted by loneliness states (e.g.,
depression), potentially contributing to better diagnosis, prevention and treatment of clinical disorders.
