Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2023 Nov 24:3:kkad029.
doi: 10.1093/psyrad/kkad029. eCollection 2023.

The positive and negative emotion functions related to loneliness: a systematic review of behavioural and neuroimaging studies

Qianyi Luo  1   2 , Robin Shao  3   2
Affiliations
Review

The positive and negative emotion functions related to loneliness: a systematic review of behavioural and neuroimaging studies

Qianyi Luo et al. Psychoradiology. .

Abstract

Loneliness is associated with high prevalences of major psychiatric illnesses such as major depression. However, the underlying emotional mechanisms of loneliness remained unclear. We hypothesized that loneliness originates from both decreases in positive emotional processing and increases in negative emotion processing. To test this, we conducted a systematic review of 29 previous studies (total participants n = 19 560, mean age = 37.16 years, female proportion = 59.7%), including 18 studies that included questionnaire measures of emotions only, and 11 studies that examined the brain correlates of emotions. The main findings were that loneliness was negatively correlated with general positive emotions and positively correlated with general negative emotions. Furthermore, limited evidence indicates loneliness exhibited negative and positive correlations with the brain positive (e.g. the striatum) and negative (e.g. insula) emotion systems, respectively, but the sign of correlation was not entirely consistent. Additionally, loneliness was associated with the structure and function of the brain emotion regulation systems, particularly the prefrontal cortex, but the direction of this relationship remained ambiguous. We concluded that the existing evidence supported a bivalence model of loneliness, but several critical gaps existed that could be addressed by future studies that include adolescent and middle-aged samples, use both questionnaire and task measures of emotions, distinguish between general emotion and social emotion as well as between positive and negative emotion regulation, and adopt a longitudinal design that allows us to ascertain the causal relationships between loneliness and emotion dysfunction. Our findings provide new insights into the underlying emotion mechanisms of loneliness that can inform interventions for lonely individuals.

Keywords: emotion regulation; loneliness; negative emotion; positive emotion; prefrontal cortex; social emotion; striatum.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

None declared.

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
The bivalence emotion model of loneliness. The bivalence emotion model of loneliness suggests that changes in both positive and negative emotion systems can lead to loneliness. Furthermore, different brain regions are involved in processing various emotional aspects of loneliness. For instance, the striatum and VMPFC handle the positive emotions, while the insula and amygdala are responsible for processing the negative emotions. Existing evidence indicates a closer connection between loneliness and negative emotions, whereas the connection to positive emotions is less clear. This figure was created using materials obtained from BioRender.com, with full license granted.
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
PRISMA flowchart.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

References

    1. Arbula S, Pisanu E, Rumiati RI (2021) Representation of social content in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex underlies individual differences in agreeableness trait. Neuroimage. 235:118049. - PubMed
    1. Atallah HE, McCool AD, Howe MWet al. (2014) Neurons in the ventral striatum exhibit cell-type-specific representations of outcome during learning. Neuron. 82:1145–56. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Atzil S, Satpute AB, Zhang Jet al. (2023) The impact of sociality and affective valence on brain activation: a meta-analysis. Neuroimage. 268:119879. - PubMed
    1. Badal VD, Lee EE, Daly Ret al. (2022) Dynamics of loneliness among older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic: pilot study of ecological momentary assessment with network analysis. Front Digit Health. 4:814179. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Baek EC, Hyon R, López Ket al. (2022) In-degree centrality in a social network is linked to coordinated neural activity. Nat Commun. 13:1118. - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources