A team of researchers led by Survjit Cheeta recruited a very specific sample of participants to discern the unique effects of loneliness and depression on the processing of emotional facial expressions. In a facial emotion processing task, loneliness was linked to higher accuracy in identifying sad faces, while depression was linked to lower accuracy in identifying happy faces. Additionally, being lonely, depressed or being lonely and depressed were associated with mislabeling neutral faces as sad (Cheeta et al., 2021). Because the two conditions often coexist, it is difficult to distinguish which deficits result from the combination of loneliness and depression, and which result from loneliness or depression alone.
What methodology did they use?
Using a screening questionnaire, the team identified and recruited four groups: 21 participants with high loneliness and high depression scores, 11 participants with high loneliness and low depression scores, and 10 participants with low loneliness and high depression scores; and a final group of 35 participants had low scores on both loneliness and depression (control group).
Subsequently, they all performed a facial emotion processing task in which they were shown, on a computer screen, a total of 144 faces expressing different emotions at different intensities. Participants were then asked to select the emotion displayed on the face from a list of six options: happy, sad, angry, fear, disgust, or surprise.
What did you find
The researchers found that:
- Loneliness alone was associated with greater accuracy in identifying sad faces, which is consistent with previous findings showing that lonely people are especially sensitive to certain emotional cues. However, loneliness alone was also linked to reduced accuracy in identifying fearful faces, which is inconsistent with this view.
- Loneliness was also associated with a lower likelihood of labeling neutral faces as happy, which is in line with previous studies showing a negative processing bias among lonely people.
- Depression alone was linked to reduced accuracy in identifying happy faces, suggesting a negativity bias among depressed people that limits their accuracy in recognizing happy faces.
- Newly, comorbid loneliness and depression were associated with misidentification of neutral faces as sad. Interestingly, both loneliness alone and depression alone were also associated with misidentifying neutral faces as sad.
Based on these results, the authors point out the importance of treating both loneliness and depression by addressing deficits in emotion processing.
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Cheeta and her team note that their study design required them to recruit participants who were only lonely and not depressed, as well as participants who were only depressed but not lonely. The challenges of recruiting these specific groups of individuals led to variable sample sizes across the four groups, which may have affected their findings.
Bibliographic reference: Cheeta, S., Beevers, J., Chambers, S., Szameitat, A., & Chandler, C. (2021). Seeing sadness: Comorbid effects of loneliness and depression on emotional face processing. Brain and Behavior, eleven(7), e02189. https://doi.org/
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