Seeing Sadness: Comorbidity of Loneliness and Depression on Emotional Face Processing

First published: May 30, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.2189

Commentary

Loneliness and depression are comorbid and are associated with deficits in social processing, but this study aimed to distinguish these comorbid emotional facial expression deficits from those attributed to loneliness, or depression alone.

A total of 502 participants were included and screened for loneliness (UCLA Loneliness Scale) and depression (Beck Depression Inventory).

Of these, 77 participated in a fully crossed 2 (loneliness; low/high) and 2 (depression; low/high) between-subjects factorial design study to assess the individual comorbid effects of loneliness and depression on a computerized morphing facial.

Results showed that comorbidity was confirmed by a significant positive correlation between loneliness and depression, and that in an emotion processing task loneliness was associated with increased accuracy for sad faces, decreased accuracy for fear faces and depression, and decreased accuracy for identifying happy faces.

Comorbid loneliness and depression were also found to increase misinterpretability as sadness in neutral faces, and in lonely and depressed people alone.