How loneliness shapes social and affective evaluations and episodic memory

Loneliness, or perceive social isolation, is posited to shift cognition, including evaluative and memory processes, in ways that prioritize social and negative cues. However, it remains unclear whether these shifts reflect a general tendency to evaluate information as more negative and socially salient or specific sensitivity to social threats. Furthermore, studies on how evaluations relate to memory process is limited. We explored how loneliness shapes evaluations of social and affective information and whether these shifts produce downstream effects on memory. Study 1 investigated how loneliness influences affective and social evaluations of scenes. Study 2 examined how loneliness influences affective evaluations of naturalistic faces and subsequent recognition memory. Across two studies, loneliness was associated with shifts in evaluative processes, but the direction of these effects varied across contexts and sample cohorts. In Study 1, we found partial evidence that loneliness was linked to increased negative evaluations for neutral and negative social and non-social scenes and increased sociality evaluations for negative stimuli. In contrast, in Study 2 loneliness did not shift evaluations of negative or neutral faces but was associated with increased positive evaluations for ambivalent faces. We found no significant effect of loneliness on memory. These findings suggest that loneliness may influence evaluative processes differently depending on contexts and populations, and these shifts in evaluations do not translate into differences in episodic memory.