Running Head : LONELINESS AND HYPERVIGILANCE TO SOCIAL THREAT 1 l

This series of studies is the first to examine hypervigilance for social threat among lonely children and the first to establish this link using eye-tracking technology. Hypervigilance for social threat was operationalised as hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion in a variation of the hostile attribution paradigm (Study 1), scores on the Children’s RejectionSensitivity Questionnaire (Study 2), and visual attention to socially threatening stimuli (Study 3). The participants were 185 children (11 years –7 months to 12 years – 6 months), 248 children (9 years -4 months to 11 years -8 months) and 147 children (8 years – 10 months to 12 years – 10 months) in the three studies, respectively. Regression analyses showed that, with depressive symptoms covaried, there were quadratic relations between loneliness and these different measures of hypervigilance to social threat. As hypothesized, only children in the upper range of loneliness demonstrated elevated hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion, higher scores on the rejection sensitivity questionnaire, and disengagement difficulties when viewing socially threatening stimuli. We found that very lonely children are hypersensitive to social threat.