Abstract

Loneliness causes serious social issue that negatively affects individuals' mental and physical health. Nonetheless, lonely individuals often struggle to escape the burden of loneliness, and their symptoms even get worse in some cases. One of the major factors is the negative cognitive biases triggered by loneliness. According to these biases, lonely individuals not only become more sensitive to negative stimuli in their environment but also tend to interpret the same stimuli in a more negative manner. In this regard, this study utilizes the facial emotion recognition process-a key cue in social communication-and aims to investigate the differences in gaze patterns on emotional faces depending on individuals' levels of loneliness. To achieve this, a preliminary loneliness survey was conducted among 127 participants. Total 48 individuals were selected-24 for the high-loneliness group(HLG) and 24 for the low-loneliness group(LLG)-based on ±1 standard deviation on estimated mean. Subsequently, eye-tracker were used to compare and analyze their gaze patterns when viewing angry, happy, and neutral face. In this context, gaze patterns refer to the number of fixations and the duration of fixations on specific areas of the face, such as the eyes, nose, and mouth, in response to facial emotional stimuli. The main findings of this study are as follows: 1) HLG tend to avoid gaze on the eye region compared to LLG-lower number of fixations and shorter fixation durations. This gaze pattern was consistent not only for angry but also for happy and neutral face. 2) HLG showed a longer fixation duration on the nose region compared to LLG. This study contributes to the existing research on emotion recognition by examining gaze patterns toward emotional face in lonely individuals and provides new insights into the cognitive characteristics of loneliness.