ArticleScientific reports2020
Positive attitudes and negative expectations in lonely individuals.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Large-Scale Neuroimaging and Genetic Analyses of the Human Thalamus in Loneliness.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- The Bidirectional Relationship between Hope, Prosocial Behavior and Loneliness in Chinese Adolescents.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2026Article
- How do consumers perceive virtual agents with behavioral realism? The role of loneliness and trust.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The impact of loneliness on the self-reference effect in remembering and directed forgetting.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Willingness to trust is reduced by loneliness and paranoia.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Loneliness and self-concept in the relations between Theory of Mind and social anhedonia in adolescents.Journal of research on adolescence : the official journal of the Society for Research on Adolescence · 2025Article
- Cognitive Function and Subjective Well-Being in Japanese Community-Dwelling Older Adults: A Cross-Sectional Study.Geriatrics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Loneliness is associated with unstable and distorted emotion transition predictions.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The alone team: How an alone mindset affects group processes.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2025Article
- Loneliness Is Associated With Decreased Support and Increased Strain Given in Social Relationships.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Homophily and social influence as mechanisms of loneliness clustering in social networks.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Developmental trajectories of loneliness and social support in older adults: based on the parallel process latent growth curve model.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Association between support of basic psychological needs and stress response as mediated by motivation for solitude.PloS one · 2024Article
- Examining the effectiveness of a training program on improving knowledge, functional skills, and attitude in natural disaster volunteers.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Digital loneliness-changes of social recognition through AI companions.Frontiers in digital health · 2024Review
- Neurocomputational mechanisms of biased impression formation in lonely individuals.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Self-reported childhood family adversity is linked to an attenuated gain of trust during adolescence.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Evaluating the Efficacy of a Guided and Unguided Internet-Based Self-help Intervention for Chronic Loneliness: Protocol for a 3-Arm Randomized Controlled Trial.JMIR research protocols · 2022Article
- Smartphone-Based Ecological Momentary Assessment of Coping with Loneliness amid COVID-19 in Germany.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Positive and negative experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic among lonely and non-lonely populations in Germany.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Loneliness is a central predictor of depression and major factor of all-cause mortality. Loneliness is supposed to be a warning signal prompting individuals to seek out social connections. However, lonely individuals seem to be less likely to engage in prosocial activities and are overall more socially withdrawn. Hence, it is yet unclear whether and how loneliness affects an individual's social motivations. Prosocial attitudes and expectations about social interactions of lonely individuals might shed light on whether lonely individuals are more prone to connect or withdraw from social activities. Here, results from a large dataset (~ 15,500 individuals) provide evidence for both. In particular, lonely individuals indicate stronger altruistic attitudes, suggesting a positive tendency to build and maintain social bonds. However, they also report more negative expectations about others, as they believe their social partners be less fair and trustworthy, suggesting less favorable evaluations of social interactions. By highlighting an important link between loneliness, prosocial attitudes and social expectations, this work stresses the role of loneliness in social motivations, points to potential consequences for social behaviors, and proposes a mechanism for the paradoxical effects of loneliness on an individual's social attitudes and expectations, with important implications for future basic and clinical research, as well as education, economics and public policy.
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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.