Absence and Presence of Human Interaction: The Relationship Between Loneliness and Empathy

Abstract

Loneliness is the negative experience of a discrepancy between the desired and actual personal network of relationships. Whereas past work have focused on the effect of loneliness on prosocial behaviors, the present research addressed the gap by exploring the effect of loneliness on empathy. Empathy is the emotional reaction of sharing in others' internal experiences. We adopted a new paradigm-empathy selection task, which uses free choices to assess the desire to empathize. Participants made a series of binary choices, selecting situations that instructed them to empathize or objectively describe. Results from two studies showed that, compared to non-lonely people, lonely people were more likely to choose positive empathy but to avoid negative empathy. The pattern occurs because lonely people perceived higher (vs. lower) social support in the positive (vs. negative) empathy tasks. Moreover, empathy served to be an adaptive emotion regulation strategy developed by lonely people to reduce their loneliness effectively. This research has resulted in both theoretical contributions to prosocial behavior literature and the further discovery of practical implications for loneliness intervention.

High perceived isolation and reduced social support affect headache impact levels in migraine after the Covid-19 outbreak: A cross sectional survey on chronic and episodic patients

“…However, HHI and LHI patients were discriminated by the Emotional Loneliness scores. Emotional loneliness that is prompted by the subjective evaluation of the lack of desired interpersonal relationships has proved more damaging for health (34) and relevant to mortality in older adults (35), compared to the effects possibly exerted by social loneliness, which instead arises as a result of the perception of the lack of a supportive social network. Moreover, as recently reported, loneliness has a crucial impact on illness experience in patients with migraine, particularly in the chronic form, reflected in the reduced ability in selfmanagement and the individual satisfaction towards the current state of care (36,37).…”

Caring is costly: People avoid the cognitive work of compassion.

“…Furthermore, their choices for empathy were impacted by experimental manipulations of empathic efficacy (Cameron et al, 2019), showing that effort costs accounted for motivation to avoid empathy. This method has also been extended to examine empathy regulation in physicians , motivational incentives for empathy regulation (e.g., financial and social-relational; Ferguson et al, 2020), and whether loneliness associates with empathy regulation (Hu et al, 2020).…”

“…Furthermore, their choices for empathy were impacted by experimental manipulations of empathic efficacy (Cameron et al, 2019), showing that effort costs accounted for motivation to avoid empathy. This method has also been extended to examine empathy regulation in physicians (Cameron & Inzlicht, 2020), motivational incentives for empathy regulation (e.g., financial and social-relational; Ferguson et al, 2020), and whether loneliness associates with empathy regulation (Hu et al, 2020). Therefore, the free choice approach may afford a new avenue for isolating compassion from empathy, examining whether motivations to regulate one over the other may differ in meaningful ways, and determine why this might be the case (e.g., differing effort costs).…”

Caring is Costly: People Avoid the Cognitive Work of Compassion

“…Furthermore, their choices for empathy were impacted by experimental manipulations of empathic efficacy (Cameron et al, 2019), showing that effort costs accounted for motivation to avoid empathy. This method has also been extended to examine empathy regulation in physicians , motivational incentives for empathy regulation (e.g., financial and social-relational; Ferguson et al, 2020), and whether loneliness associates with empathy regulation (Hu et al, 2020). Therefore, the free choice approach may afford a new avenue for isolating compassion from empathy, examining whether motivations to regulate one over the other may differ in meaningful ways, and determine why this might be the case (e.g., differing effort costs).…”