Assistant Professor of Psychology Kelly Faig recently published articles on loneliness in the journals Current Issues in Behavioral Sciences, Psychophysiology, and PLOS One. The articles present results of her research with colleagues at Rutgers University, the University of Montana, and the University of Chicago.
According to Faig, existing research has shown that loneliness is associated with an information processing bias in which other people are perceived as threatening and the actions of others are interpreted as hostile and negative. “This bias disrupts efforts to form new relationships and maintain existing ones, perpetuating the cycle of loneliness,” she said.
Faig’s research expands this idea by studying whether strong patterns exist in published work on loneliness and the perception of emotions in others, and by testing the effects of loneliness on attention to social and emotional words, as well as on perceptions of one’s own contributions to social relationships.
“How Does Loneliness Impact Emotion Perception? A Systematic Review,” for which Faig was the lead author, appears in Current Issues in Behavioral Sciences. The article examines loneliness and its possible relationship with a bias toward the perception of threatening emotions, like anger, in others. Their results showed that “in contrast to theoretical predictions, the majority of studies found that loneliness demonstrated a lack of a relationship with emotion perception, or was associated with decreased accuracy in the recognition of emotion expressions in faces.”
“Loneliness is Associated with Decreased Support and Increased Strain Given in Social Relationships,” on which Faig was a co-author, was published in Psychophysiology. It presents an investigation of “how loneliness and resting parasympathetic (HF-HRV) functioning influence perceptions of one’s own contributions to relationships with friends and family.” The results “support the idea that loneliness is related to negative self-evaluation of support and strain given in relationships and self-perceived contributions in the context of autonomic functioning,” the authors said, but that “more work is needed to determine the robustness of such associations.”
Faig also contributed to “Loneliness is Not Associated with Attention Interference of Negative Social Information: Evidence from Four Studies,” published in PLOS One. She and her collaborators “examined four datasets using individual participant data meta-analytical techniques to test the link between loneliness and attention interference to social threat cues in an Emotional Stroop task.” They found that “despite existing theoretical frameworks predicting heightened attentional interference for negative social information in lonely individuals, [there was] no support for this effect across the four samples.”
Posted October 7, 2025
