| Loneliness is an important research topic that has attracted wide attention from psychology researchers in the past 30 years. The issues of stay-home children have attracted attention from Chinese society since 2004 and researchers began to conduct studies on loneliness with samples of stay-home children. Wang and Zhang (2006) found that there is a high rate of loneliness (17.6%) among stay-home children. Another investigation reported that kindness deficiency was an important factor leading to low level of self-esteem and high level of loneliness (Li-Juan Liu, Xun Sun, Chun-Li Zhang, Yue Wang,& Qiang Guo,2010). A close inspection on literature reveals that previous studies have mainly focused on the development situation, influencing factors, and educational countermeasures on stay-home children's'loneliness. So far no study has been done to examine the characteristics of information processing on parental care lack related events among these children. Research in this area will provide theoretical and practical directions on the releasing of these children's loneliness and improving their social emotional ability.This study has systematically explored the structure of loneliness of stay-home children and their processing of information relevant to loneliness, by using questionnaire, interview, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, regression analysis, experiment, and physiological measurement. The whole research is divided into two parts including six studies. The first part is the foundation of the whole research, which has been referred to the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of loneliness and development characteristic among stay-home children. The second part is the focal point of the research, which has explored the biased and automatically processing of related information. We have made the following conclusions:(a) The measurement for loneliness among stay-home middle students is acceptable with regarding to its psychometrics index.(b) The loneliness among stay-home middle student is composed of three factors including parent-children relationship, social relationship, and peer relationship.(c) No gender difference was found on the loneliness of participants in this study, while a significant grade difference was found, with students of higher grades reporting lower loneliness.(d) No parent going-out type difference was found on the whole score of loneliness among the participants. However, with regard to the dimension of social relationship, there was a significant difference, with father going out>father and mother going out>mother going out.(e) No guardian difference was found on the whole score loneliness. However, regarding relationship with father, there was a significant difference, with other guardian>mother guardian>grandparents guardian> uncle or aunt.(f) There is a negatively biased encoding of related information among participants. Specifically, the participants tend to encode negative and positive items into positive items, and they showed bigger negative bias towards negative items while exhibited smaller bias towards positive and neutral items.(g) There is a negatively biased memory of related information among participants. Specifically, they tend to recall less positive items in positive conditions, while they recalled more negative items in negative conditions. In the neutral conditions, the participants with familial loneliness and peer loneliness recalled more negative items,(h) There is a negative priming effect when stay-home middle school students processing relevant information. They responded slowly towards these information and exhibited inhibitions.(i) There is a negatively subliminal priming effect when stay-home middle school students processing relevant information. Specifically, they exhibited inhibitions towards parental care lack information, which led to a long response time. And they took more time to response when the target words were different from the priming words.The present research has tried to made contributions to literature from the following aspects:first, this research has explored and constructed the structure model of loneliness among stay-home children and understood its development; second, we have develop a psychometrically sound measurement of loneliness for stay-home children; third, we have confirmed that there is a biased and automatically processing of information related to loneliness among stay-home children; and fourth, this research has provided with new directions for future studies in the domain of loneliness.
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