Loneliness and the recognition of vocal socioemotional expressions in adolescence

Lonely individuals show increased social monitoring and heightened recognition of negative facial expressions. The current study investigated whether this pattern extends to other nonverbal modalities by examining associations between loneliness and the recognition of vocal emotional expressions. Youth, ages 11-18 years (n = 122), were asked to identify the intended emotion in auditory portrayals of basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) and social expressions (friendliness, meanness). Controlling for social anxiety, age, and gender, links between loneliness and recognition accuracy were emotion-specific: loneliness was associated with poorer recognition of fear, but better recognition of friendliness. Lonely individuals' motivation to avoid threat may interfere with the recognition of fear, but their attunement to affiliative cues may promote the identification of friendliness in affective prosody. Monitoring for social affiliation cues in others' voices might represent an adaptive function of the reconnection system in lonely youth, and be a worthy target for intervention.