Lonely adolescents exhibit heightened sensitivity for facial cues of emotion.
Cogn Emot
; 31(2): 377-383, 2017 02.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-26461799
ABSTRACT
Contradicting evidence exists regarding the link between loneliness and sensitivity to facial cues of emotion, as loneliness has been related to better but also to worse performance on facial emotion recognition tasks. This study aims to contribute to this debate and extends previous work by (a) focusing on both accuracy and sensitivity to detecting positive and negative expressions, (b) controlling for depressive symptoms and social anxiety, and (c) using an advanced emotion recognition task with videos of neutral adolescent faces gradually morphing into full-intensity expressions. Participants were 170 adolescents (49% boys; Mage = 13.65 years) from rural, low-income schools. Results showed that loneliness was associated with increased sensitivity to happy, sad, and fear faces. When controlling for depressive symptoms and social anxiety, loneliness remained significantly associated with sensitivity to sad and fear faces. Together, these results suggest that lonely adolescents are vigilant to negative facial cues of emotion.
Palavras-chave
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Comportamento do Adolescente
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Emoções
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Expressão Facial
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Solidão
Tipo de estudo:
Diagnostic_studies
Limite:
Adolescent
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Female
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Humans
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Male
Idioma:
En
Ano de publicação:
2017
Tipo de documento:
Article