Loneliness and attention to social threat in young adults: Findings from an eye tracker study

Cacioppo and Hawkley (2009) have hypothesized that lonely people are hyper-vigilant to social threat, with earlier work (Jones & Carver, 1991) linking this bias specifically to threats of social rejection or social exclusion. The current study examined this hypothesis in eighty-five young adults (mean age = 18.22; SD = 0.46; 17–19 years in age) using eye-tracking methodology, which entailed recording their visual attention to social rejecting...