Choking under pressure: Does it get easier with age? How loneliness affects social monitoring across the life span

Previous experimental work showed that young adults reporting loneliness performed less well on emotion recognition tasks (Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy [DANVA-2]) if they were framed as indicators of social aptitude, but not when the same tasks were framed as indexing academic aptitude. Such findings suggested that undergraduates reporting loneliness possessed the social monitoring skills necessary to read the emotions underlying others’ facial expressions, but that they choked under social pressure. It has also been found that undergraduates reporting loneliness have better recall for both positive and negative social information than their non-lonely counterparts. Whether those effects are evident across different age groups has not been examined. Using data from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Loneliness Experiment that included participants aged 16–99 years ( N = 54,060), we (i) test for replication in a larger worldwide sample and (ii) extend those linear model analyses to other age groups. We found only effects for participants aged 25–34 years: In this age group, loneliness was associated with increased recall of negative individual information, and with choking under social pressure during the emotion recognition task; those effects were small. We did not find any such effects among participants in other age groups. Our findings suggest that different cognitive processes may be associated with loneliness in different age groups, highlighting the importance of life-course approaches in this area.

Humans are sensitive to attention control when predicting others’ actions

Studies of social perception report acute human sensitivity to where another’s attention is aimed. Here we ask whether humans are also sensitive to how the other’s attention is deployed. Observers viewed videos of actors reaching to targets without knowing that those actors were sometimes choosing to reach to one of the targets (endogenous control) and sometimes being directed to reach to one of the targets (exogenous control). Experiments 1 and 2 showed that observers could respond more rapidly when actors chose where to reach, yet were at chance when guessing whether the reach was chosen or directed. This implicit sensitivity to attention control held when either actor’s faces or limbs were masked (experiment 3) and when only the earliest actor’s movements were visible (experiment 4). Individual differences in sensitivity to choice correlated with an independent measure of social aptitude. We conclude that humans are sensitive to attention control through an implicit kinematic process linked to empathy. The findings support the hypothesis that social cognition involves the predictive modeling of others’ attentional states.

Autistic traits and sensitivity to human-like features of robot behavior

This study examined individual differences in sensitivity to human-like features of a robot’s behavior. The paradigm comprised a non-verbal Turing test with a humanoid robot. A “programmed” condition differed from a “human-controlled” condition by onset times of the robot’s eye movements, which were either fixed across trials or modeled after prerecorded human reaction times, respectively. Participants judged whether the robot behavior was programmed or human-controlled, with no information regarding the differences between respective conditions. Autistic traits were measured with the autism-spectrum quotient (AQ) questionnaire in healthy adults. We found that the fewer autistic traits participants had, the more sensitive they were to the difference between the conditions, without explicit awareness of the nature of the difference. We conclude that although sensitivity to fine behavioral characteristics of others varies with social aptitude, humans are in general capable of detecting human-like behavior based on very subtle cues.