ArticleFrontiers in psychology2020
Absence and Presence of Human Interaction: The Relationship Between Loneliness and Empathy.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 52 citations in OpenAlex.
- Lonelier people feel less empathic despite intact neural empathy responses after meditation training.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Trial
- Keep the bedtime story: A daily reading ritual improves empathy and creativity in children.PloS one · 2026Trial
- Costly missed connections: Visitation and misconduct in California prisons.Science advances · 2026Article
- Determinants of empathy, depression and loneliness in Serbian medical students.Discover mental health · 2026Article
- Association of loneliness and perceived social exclusion with donation behavior among community-dwelling individuals aged 40 and over: longitudinal evidence from the nationally representative German Ageing Survey.Aging clinical and experimental research · 2026Observational
- A three-arm randomized controlled trial protocol: Effects of telephone-based, layperson-delivered wisdom-enhancement narrative therapy and empathy-focused interventions on loneliness, social, and mental health in older adults.Contemporary clinical trials communications · 2025Article
- A Cross-Sectional Study on the Relationship Between Social Media Use and Frailty Among the Older People in Japan.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Effects of Empathy on Loneliness Among Rural Left-Behind Children in China: The Chain-Mediated Roles of Social Anxiety and Psychological Resilience.Psychology research and behavior management · 2024Article
- The Key Role of Empathy in the Relationship between Age and Social Support.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Psychosocial predictors of COVID-19 infection in UK biobank (N = 104 201).Journal of public health (Oxford, England) · 2023Article
- Reliability of the empathy selection task, a novel behavioral measure of empathy avoidance.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- The Relationship between Social Support, Empathy, Self-Efficacy, and Humanistic Practice Ability among Clinical Nurses in China: A Structural Equation Model.Journal of nursing management · 2023Article
- Exposure to loneliness cues reduces prosocial behavior: Evidence from N400 and P300.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Factors associated with health-related quality of life among employed individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: A correlational study in China.Belitung nursing journal · 2023Article
- Loneliness in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Neglected Factor in Accelerated Aging?Journal of ageing and longevity · 2022Article
- Compliance with Standard Precaution and Its Relationship with Views on Infection Control and Prevention Policy among Chinese University Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Hospital schools during COVID-19: Teachers' perspective.Journal of mother and child · 2022Article
- Romantic relationship satisfaction and phubbing: The role of loneliness and empathy.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- High perceived isolation and reduced social support affect headache impact levels in migraine after the Covid-19 outbreak: A cross sectional survey on chronic and episodic patients.Cephalalgia : an international journal of headache · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Loneliness is the negative experience of a discrepancy between the desired and actual personal network of relationships. Whereas past work have focused on the effect of loneliness on prosocial behaviors, the present research addressed the gap by exploring the effect of loneliness on empathy. Empathy is the emotional reaction of sharing in others' internal experiences. We adopted a new paradigm-empathy selection task, which uses free choices to assess the desire to empathize. Participants made a series of binary choices, selecting situations that instructed them to empathize or objectively describe. Results from two studies showed that, compared to non-lonely people, lonely people were more likely to choose positive empathy but to avoid negative empathy. The pattern occurs because lonely people perceived higher (vs. lower) social support in the positive (vs. negative) empathy tasks. Moreover, empathy served to be an adaptive emotion regulation strategy developed by lonely people to reduce their loneliness effectively. This research has resulted in both theoretical contributions to prosocial behavior literature and the further discovery of practical implications for loneliness intervention.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.