The Effects Of Affective Priming On Attentional Bias Of Individuals With Loneliness

Loneliness is a negative emotion that arises when people are dissatisfaction with own social relationships.The psychological state and the social environment can affect the loneliness.The study found that individuals with loneliness are sensitive to social rejected information and easy to interpret the words and behaviors of others as refusal.These indicate that individuals with loneliness have negative cognition of self and others,make they have remarkable attention bias toward social rejected information.Severe loneliness may trigger other psychological disorders,therefore,it is necessary to adjust the negative cognition of lonely individuals to eliminate attentional bias.Some researchers say that they can effectively regulate their cognition of the target stimulus by priming the positive emotions of the individual.According to the principle of mood congruent effect,the study explore the impact of emotion priming to attentional bias among individuals with loneliness.There were two studies.In the preparatory study,a random sampling method was used to investigate the status of loneliness of 604 college students by the UCLA scale.The independent sample T-test and one-way ANOVA were used to explore the differences of loneliness among college students of different genders and grades.In the first study,30 lonely college students and 30 nonlonely college students were selected.The facial expression pictures were taken as the task material,Using the emotion Stroop paradigm to study the attentional bias of lonely individuals on social rejected information.In the second study,88 lonely college students were assigned to three priming group: no emotion,positive emotion and negative emotion.Emotional pictures were taken as the priming material.At First,the corresponding emotion of the lonely individual was primed,and then they complete the emotional Stroop task.Using the mood congruent effect to adjust attentional bias of the lonely individual.Research conclusion:(1)The average score of loneliness of college students was 43.09 points greater than 41 points.There are 63.41 percent of the students' loneliness score is greater than or equal to 41 points.These show that the overall loneliness of sample is higher.Loneliness scores of college students have significant differences in gender and grade.(2)Without emotion priming,individuals with loneliness have attentional bias toward social rejected information(the angry/disgusted face).The nonlonely individuals have attentional bias toward social accepted information(the happy face).(3)Positive emotion priming can effectively regulate the attentional bias of individuals with loneliness.(4)Compared to no emotion priming,individuals with loneliness under the negative emotion priming has a more significant attentional bias,which indicate that the negative emotion priming make the attention bias of individuals with loneliness more serious.