The Link Between Smiling and Loneliness

What signals do lonely people send in social interaction?

Loneliness, or the perceived lack of close and meaningful relationships, has reached epidemic rates. Psychologists are searching for ways to remedy it and help people build meaningful social networks. A recent study reveals one way that loneliness might be perpetuated and illuminates a potential route to breaking the cycle.

Some researchers hypothesize that loneliness is maintained by faulty processing of the social signals–such as smiles and eye contact–that are key to positive social interactions. One consequence of this impaired social cue processing may be a failure to automatically mimic other people’s facial expressions. Social mimicry is a phenomenon that occurs naturally during most interactions, in which we automatically, and often unconsciously, mimic the emotional expressions of the person we are interacting with, in face-to-face conversation.

To find out if lonely people picked up on these social cues and mimicked them automatically, researchers at the University of California, San Diego conducted a small, preliminary study with 35 student volunteers.

The students first completed three self-report questionnaires that measured their loneliness, depression, and extraversion. Based on the…