Department of Psychology, Integrative Neuroscience Area, University of Chicago.
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago.
Emotion. 2022 Jun;22(4):740-750. doi: 10.1037/emo0000773. Epub 2020 Jun 29.
Expressions of emotion represent an important and unique source of information about the states of others. Being able to effectively understand expressions of emotions to make inferences about others' internal mental states and use these inferences to guide decision-making and behavior is critical to navigating social relationships. Loneliness, the perception that one lacks social connection, has important functional consequences for how individuals attend to signals of emotions in others. However, it is less clear whether loneliness changes how individuals recognize emotions in others. In medical practitioners, being able to accurately recognize emotional cues from patients is critical to effectively diagnosing and reacting with care to those patients. The current study examines the relationship between changes in loneliness during medical school and students' recognition of emotion in others. Measures of loneliness and emotion recognition were collected from 122 medical students during their first 3 years of medical school at the beginning and end of each academic year. Changes in loneliness were related to changes in emotion detection, with increases in loneliness being associated with decreases in the probability of accurately discriminating sad and angry faces from other expressions, decreases in the probability of mislabeling emotion expressions as happy, and increases in the probability of mislabeling other emotional expressions as pained and angry. This study suggests that changes in loneliness during medical school are associated with increases in students' labeling emotional expressions as negative, possibly by shifting attention to cues of negative emotion and away from cues of positive emotion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
情感表达是了解他人状态的重要且独特的信息来源。能够有效地理解情感表达，从而对他人的内部心理状态进行推断，并利用这些推断来指导决策和行为，对于处理人际关系至关重要。孤独感是指一个人缺乏社交联系的感觉，它对个体如何关注他人情感信号有重要的功能后果。然而，目前尚不清楚孤独感是否会改变个体对他人情感的识别方式。对于医疗从业者来说，能够准确识别患者的情绪线索对于有效地诊断和关心患者至关重要。本研究考察了医学院学生孤独感变化与他们对他人情绪识别之间的关系。在医学院的头 3 年，研究人员在每个学年的开始和结束时，从 122 名医学生那里收集了孤独感和情绪识别的测量数据。孤独感的变化与情绪检测的变化有关，孤独感的增加与准确区分悲伤和愤怒表情与其他表情的概率降低、将情绪表情错误标记为快乐的概率降低以及将其他情绪表情错误标记为痛苦和愤怒的概率增加有关。这项研究表明，医学院学生孤独感的变化与他们将情绪表达标记为负面的可能性增加有关，这可能是通过将注意力转移到负面情绪的线索上，而不是正面情绪的线索上。
