LONELINESS AND THE EVALUATION OF RELATIONAL EVENTS

If loneliness inclines people to a general hostility towards others an d to a disparaging style about social interaction, then the style shou ld appear in studies of lonely people interacting with their friends, as well as observing other persons they do not know. We conducted a st udy with 4 features: it compared (a) lonely and non-lonely persons' ev aluation of (b) their own and other people's conversations with friend s, using (c) both free evaluation and videotape-prompted evaluation (d ) both immediately after the interaction and 6 weeks later. Lonely per sons did not consistently evaluate their or others' conversations nega tively, though they tended to rate communication quality lower. They d id, however, draw negative global conclusions about their own relation ships, especially after reviewing a videotape of their own interaction 6 weeks later. We conjecture that lonely people are negative about in teractions when they focus on their own communicative performance, and that they also have characteristic ways of evaluating and generalizin g from their own interactions that feed into general patterns of dissa tisfaction with their own social performance in relationships as a who le.