Projecting loneliness into the past and future: implications for self-esteem and affect
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Projecting loneliness into the past and future: implications for self‑esteem and affect Nadya Teneva1 · Edward P. Lemay Jr.1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Loneliness reflects a threat to people’s need to belong in close relationships, and is associated with lower self-esteem and emotional distress. The current 2-week daily diary study examined memory and prospection, or future oriented thinking, as potential mediators of these psychological responses to loneliness. Results suggest that daily loneliness biased people’s memories of inclusion that occurred yesterday and predictions of inclusion that will occur tomorrow and in the general future. People remembered more exclusion in the past and expected more exclusion in the future on days they felt lonely, independently of whether they actually were or would be excluded. Relative to memories, predictions of future exclusion appeared to be more biased by current loneliness and less accurate. In turn, biases involving predictions of future exclusion mediated effects of loneliness on daily self-esteem and positive affect, but not negative affect, suggesting that experiences of loneliness are associated with lower psychological well-being (i.e., lower self-esteem and reduced positive affect) partly because people tend to project those experiences into the future. Biases involving memories of past inclusion did not mediate the effects of daily loneliness on these outcomes. Both memories and forecasts of inclusion mediated the effects of trait loneliness on self-esteem and positive affect but not negative affect, suggesting that chronically lonely people may experience lower self-esteem and fewer positive emotions, in part, because of their tendencies to predict and remember social exclusion. Implications of these findings for understanding psychological responses to belongingness threats are discussed. Keywords Loneliness · Exclusion · Prospection · Memory · Bias
Introduction Humans have a strong need to belong in close relationships, and they experience negative outcomes when this need is thwarted (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Bowlby 1980). For example, people who feel socially excluded behave aggressively (Twenge et al. 2001), become less helpful (Twenge et al. 2007), and exhibit reduced self-control (Baumeister et al. 2005). In addition, when people perceive they are being excluded, they tend to report feeling lonely (Leary 1990); Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-020-09842-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Nadya Teneva [email protected] * Edward P. Lemay Jr. [email protected] 1
University of Maryland, College Park, USA
the correlation between the two has been found to be as high as 0.92 (Leary et al. 1995). These feelings of loneliness have been linked to poor psychological adjustment, such as depressive symptoms and impaired cognitive functioning (Ernst and Cacioppo 1999; Hawkley
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