BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Decision Neuroscience
This article is part of the Research TopicThe brain and social interactions: from paradigms of social emotion recognition to hyperscanningView all 6 articles
Preliminary ERP evidence of loneliness impact on Stroop interference by socio-emotional stimuli
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Lombardy, Italy
- 2Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS, IUSS Cognitive Neuroscience (ICoN) Center, Piazza della Vittoria 15, Pavia, Italy, Pavia, Italy
- 3Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, University of Messina, Messina, Italy
- 4Istituti Clinici Scientifici Maugeri IRCCS, Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of Pavia Institute, Via Maugeri 10, Pavia, Italy, Pavia, Italy
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Growing evidence highlights the adverse clinical effects and societal implications of loneliness, i.e., the negative feeling associated with a perceived discrepancy between desired and existing social connections. To further understand the implicit attentional and cognitive control processes associated with loneliness, we used electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the relationship between loneliness levels and brain activity underlying attentional capture in a socio-emotional Stroop task. In keeping with previous reports of a three-stage processing of socio-emotional words, positive-negative valence and social-individual content of word stimuli reflected in the amplitude of ERP components associated with high-order perceptual processing and preliminary emotional decoding (P200), emotional and semantic processing (P300), and interference suppression (N450). In the latter stage, the differential N450 amplitude associated with processing social negative compared with control-neutral stimuli was negatively correlated with self-perceived loneliness levels. This finding suggests that social negative and neutral stimuli are processed more dissimilarly at higher levels of self-perceived loneliness, possibly due to increased hypervigilance towards negative social cues, like those associated with rejection or exclusion. By elucidating the neural mechanisms underlying the effect of loneliness on socio-cognitive processing, these findings provide novel insights to guide future research and inform the development of innovative therapeutic interventions targeting the consequences of social isolation.
Keywords: Emotional Stroop task, EEG, Loneliness, Social concepts, Attention, intervention, cognitive control, ERPs
Received: 29 Mar 2025; Accepted: 19 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Arioli, Maiocchi, Cattaneo, Gianelli and Canessa. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Nicola Canessa, nicola.canessa@iusspavia.it
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