Choking under pressure: Does it get easier with age? How loneliness affects social monitoring across the life span

Abstract

Previous experimental work showed that young adults reporting loneliness performed less well on emotion recognition tasks (Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy [DANVA-2]) if they were framed as indicators of social aptitude, but not when the same tasks were framed as indexing academic aptitude. Such findings suggested that undergraduates reporting loneliness possessed the social monitoring skills necessary to read the emotions underlying others’ facial expressions, but that they choked under social pressure. It has also been found that undergraduates reporting loneliness have better recall for both positive and negative social information than their non-lonely counterparts. Whether those effects are evident across different age groups has not been examined. Using data from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Loneliness Experiment that included participants aged 16–99 years ( N = 54,060), we (i) test for replication in a larger worldwide sample and (ii) extend those linear model analyses to other age groups. We found only effects for participants aged 25–34 years: In this age group, loneliness was associated with increased recall of negative individual information, and with choking under social pressure during the emotion recognition task; those effects were small. We did not find any such effects among participants in other age groups. Our findings suggest that different cognitive processes may be associated with loneliness in different age groups, highlighting the importance of life-course approaches in this area.

Introduction to the special section on loneliness across the life span

“…We have sought to consolidate and extend the notion that loneliness is experienced across the life span. Both Pearce and colleagues (2022) and Hawkley and colleagues (2022) adopt an explicitly life course approach to understanding loneliness including populations from 16 to 99 years, whereas other contributors focus on specific life stages. Geukens and colleagues (2022) and Yang and colleagues (2022) concentrate on adolescents, while Matthews and colleagues (2022) and Mund and colleagues (2022) focus upon adults.…”

“…Geukens and colleagues (2022) report that fear of negative evaluation by others in social situations and low self-esteem predict the rate of change in loneliness over time (from ages 12 to 13 years). Pearce and colleagues (2022) report that only those aged 25−34 underperformed on social tasks, choking under pressure, potentially because of their overwhelming need for social connections.…”

The effect of social anxiety on teenagers’ internet addiction: the mediating role of loneliness and coping styles

“…In this study, adolescents had a loneliness score of (2.27 ± 0.47), which was at a moderate level. According to one survey report, 11–20% of people aged 12–15 years feel lonely at least “sometimes” [ 49 ]. Adolescents with social anxiety lack self-confidence and security when it comes to socializing, limiting their ability to build harmonious interpersonal relationships with their peers, thereby exacerbating their loneliness [ 50 ].…”