Hostile Attribution Biases are Resistant to Manipulations of Momentary Loneliness

Loneliness, a perceived discrepancy between desired and actual social relationships, shifts cognition in ways that support heightened sensitivity to potential social threat. These cognitive biases are thought to perpetuate loneliness and subsequent long term health risk. One such shift is an increased tendency to assume hostile intent behind others’ ambiguous actions, referred to as a hostile attribution bias. While loneliness has been associated with increased hostile attribution biases, empirical studies have yet to assess whether loneliness causes increased hostile attributions. Here, we tested whether experimentally induced changes in momentary loneliness can shift hostile attribution biases by randomly assigning 142 undergraduate students (ages 18–29 years old) to one of three conditions: a loneliness induction (journaling about a lonely memory), a loneliness reduction (prosocial gratitude), or a control (description of morning routine) condition. As expected, loneliness increased after journaling and decreased after prosocial gratitude. In addition, baseline loneliness was associated with a bias towards hostile attributions. However, acute changes in loneliness did not produce corresponding changes in hostile attribution biases and there was no interaction with baseline loneliness levels. These findings have implications for the design of loneliness interventions, suggesting that targeting momentary feelings of loneliness may have limited effects on some of the maladaptive cognitive biases associated with feelings of loneliness.