In normal social interactions, people tend to unconsciously mimic the language styles of one another and continuously monitor their behavior and reactions to them. However, self-focused, lonely individuals may fail to detect and adapt to social cues in the environment. This social ineptitude may be a factor in causing lonely individuals to be socially rejected in face-to-face interactions. As a result, they often turn to the internet to fulfill their affiliation needs, yet lonely individuals still fail at their attempts at social communication online. This study will explore the reason for this failure. It is hypothesized that lonely individuals will have lower self-monitoring scores and less LSM in their correspondence with others regardless of how lonely correspondents are.

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