•We examined whether loneliness was associated with hyper-vigilance to social threat.•Real-life footage and eye-tracker methodology was used.•Lonely people showed a different visual attention pattern to non-lonely people.•Lonely people fixed their attention on the social threat stimuli and later avoided it. Cacioppo and Hawkley (2009) have hypothesized that lonely people are hyper-vigilant to social threat, with earlier work (Jones & Carver, 1991) linking this bias specifically to threats of social rejection or social exclusion. The current study examined this hypothesis in eighty-five young adults (mean age=18.22; SD=0.46; 17–19years in age) using eye-tracking methodology, which entailed recording their visual attention to social rejecting information. We found a quadratic relation between the participants’ loneliness, as assessed by the revised UCLA loneliness scale, and their visual attention to social threat immediately after presentation (2s). In support of Cacioppo and Hawkley’s (2009) hypothesis, it was found that young adults in the upper quartile range of loneliness exhibited visual vigilance of socially threatening stimuli compared to other participants. There was no relation between loneliness and visual attention to socially threatening stimuli across an extended subsequent period of time. Implications for intervention are considered.