The Characteristics And Mechanisms Of Individual Cognitive Biases After Social Exclusion

Social exclusion is defined as a phenomenon or a situation in which individual is excluded,ignored or rejected by desired relationship partners or groups.There is increasing attention on social exclusion as social exclusion happens anywhere and at any time,which has a bad influence on social harmony,and individual�s physical and psychological health.Characters of cognition in the wake of social exclusion are the foundation of behavior and decision making.By reviewing previous research on cognition following social exclusion,we found there are several shortcomings and questions: previous research focus on the influence of social exclusion on behavior and decision making,few research pay attention on cognitive processing following exclusion,especially brain cognitive research;existing cognitive processing studies limited to interpersonal information processing following social exclusion,however,there was no consistent conclusion of interpersonal information processing by neurocognitive research;Otherwise,interpersonal distance which is another important dimension of interpersonal information is worth more attention;previous studies showed that social exclusion influenced interpersonal and intrapersonal cognition,however,there was a lack of research on self-related information processing following social exclusion;more importantly,theories or models were constructed to help understand excluded people�s behavior or decision making,which is not suitable to serve for understanding of information processes following social exclusion.Research based on the above-mentioned questions will fill the gap between needs and behaviors following social exclusion,which will help to have good knowledge of the mechanism of how social exclusion affects individual.From the interpersonal and intrapersonal perspective,present research employed experimental methods,behavioral method combined with ERP technique,to explore the cognitive characters and brain mechanism of processing of others� emotional information,relational others� information and self-related information after being excluded.This thesis contains five studies.We consistently employed a scenario reading task to manipulate social exclusion and social acceptance.To explore how people perceive interpersonal information after being social excluded,study 1 used face gender judgment task in which face stimuli consisted of happy faces,disgust faces and neutral faces.Study 2 was to investigate attention bias and brain activity of interpersonal information after social exclusion.By using face orientation judgment task,study 3 was to explore how people perceive self-related information and ?partner? information following social exclusion.Study 4 employed trait word dot-probe task to investigate the characters and brain activity of individual�s attention bias to evaluation-related information after social exclusion.Based on this,study 5 used reference task to further explore how people evaluate self and friend after being excluded.Findings showed that social exclusion influenced other�s emotional information processing,relational other�s information processing and self-related information processing.The details were as follows:(1)After being social exclusion,people have a cognition bias of others� acceptant information.In the perception task,social acceptance information triggered larger VPP and more positive N2 components when participants had being social excluded.In the dot-probe task,under social exclusion condition happy face clues elicited shorter and larger N170.Otherwise,people show a bias of attentional disengagement to rejection informantion.In the dot-probe task,disgust face clues triggered larger anterior frontal LPC than neutral face clues in social exclusion group.(2)After being social exclusion,people have a cognition bias of relational others� information.In the face gender judgment task,under the social exclusion condition,partner face produced larger N170 than self-face and stranger face;larger N250 than partner face in social acceptance group.In the reference task,the count of negative evaluation to friends in the social exclusion group was less and excluded individual responded faster to friends� negative trait words.(3)Being social excluded,individual�s self-esteem declined,which resulting in self-negative cognition bias.In the social exclusion group,individual responded smaller N170 to self-face than to partner�s face;in the trait dot-probe task,negative trait clues N170 was larger than neutral clues N170.Besides,in social exclusion group,?no? answers to negative trait under self-reference condition were less than under friend reference condition;and positive trait word following self reference produced smaller P200 than that in social acceptance group.(4)To maintain positive self schema after being excluded,individual showed self positive cognition bias.In the face gender judgment task,in social exclusion group self-face N100 was larger than stranger face,self-face P100 was larger than that in social acceptance group.In trait words dot-probe task,participants in social exclusion group response faster to targets following positive trait word clues than that following negative trait word clues.Besides,in the reference task,positive evaluation following self reference was faster than that following friend reference in social exclusion group.In summary,from the perspective of information processing,we proposed a need-cognition model in the wake of social exclusion: social exclusion threatens individual�s safety need,belonging need and self-esteem need,then actives individual�s self-protection motivation,interpersonal reconnection motivation and self-positive bias motivation,which has an influence on individuals� information processing.