Abstract
Social connection is associated with broad aspects of social cognition. Here, we probe the nature of this association in two studies (Ns=305, 759) with college-aged samples in which we measured different aspects of social (dis)connection (e.g., loneliness) and performance on a measure of emotion perception. We find that intersubject differences in social connection mirrored intersubject differences in emotion perception, suggesting a shared fingerprint between the experience of one’s social relationships and the perception of emotion information. Further, greater levels of social disconnection were associated with greater idiosyncrasy in emotion perception, which was largely driven by task inaccuracy. This finding suggests that social disconnection may distort internal models of affective states in a way that pulls individuals from a canonical understanding of how emotions are expressed in faces. Although findings were specific to Study 2, these results provide important context to how social connection relates to emotion perception and highlights emotion perception as a potential intervention target for social disconnection.