| Social exclusion is one of the most common phenomena or processes that destroy social bonds,in which individuals' belonging and attachment are encumbered by exclusion or rejection from others or from a social group.Social exclusion can trigger a series of emotion responses,and significantly influences human social cognition and social behavior.On the one hand,social exclusion can cause antisocial behaviors such as taking risk or being hostile.On the other hand,prosocial behaviors can also emerge after social exclusion.Excluded individuals may actively seek for relationship establishment and group acceptance.According to the Social Monitor Hypothesis,excluded individuals will pay more attention to the social information related to others and put more efforts in understanding others' intention in order to reestablish social bonds.The core of the intention understanding is observing from others' point of view,that is perspective taking.However,there are still some deficiencies in the research on the underlying mechanism of how social exclusion affects intention understanding through perspective taking.To begin with,the previous studies used varied of paradigms in social exclusion,especially for those obtained by ostracism and rejection,cannot be compared with each other.What's more,the previous studies that concentrated on the effect of social exclusion on intention understanding,adopted group measuring in the behavioral experiments.Group measuring has the deficiency that it concludes many unstable influence factors and obtains insufficient information.Last but not the least,the previous studies did not clearly delineate and measure intention understanding and caused the various focuses of perspective taking scales and behavioral experiments in different studies.Therefore,the study of social exclusion needs the standardization of operational processing,the unification of parameter patterns,and the clarification of the core of the perspective taking in the intention understanding.In addition,designing pertinent pattern of perspective taking processing combined with more practical social cognition neuroscience techniques to explore the underlying neuro mechanism of how social exclusion affects intention understanding is also essential.There are three event-related potential(ERP)components in perspective taking,including a late frontal wave with a mean amplitude between 400 and 600 ms recorded over the frontal cortex(LFW),a middle-latency component peaking between400 and 500 ms recorded over the temporal-parietal cortex(TP450);and a late slow wave(LSW)component with a mean amplitude between 600 and 800 ms recorded over the temporal-parietal cortex.Additionally,the neural oscillations related to the perspective taking include early ?(4-7Hz,200-400ms)frequency band and middle ?(8-13 Hz,400-800ms)band in parietal lobe.The present study used social exclusion as independent variable and perspective taking as dependent variable.The study intends to combine two types of social exclusion and two levels of perspective taking processing to design different perspective takings after different scenarios of social exclusion and inspect the electro-encephalic responses of how social exclusion affects perspective taking by four EEG/ERP experiments.The first experiment adopted online pitching task as the inducement of exile social exclusion and studied its effect on low-level perspective taking processing.The second experiment designed the getting to know each other task in real scenarios to induce reject social exclusion and inspected its effect on low-level perspective taking.The third experiment adopted online pitching task as the inducement of exile social exclusion and studied its effect on high-level perspective taking processing.The fourth experiment designed the getting to know each other task in real scenarios to induce reject social exclusion and inspected its effect on high-level perspective taking.The goal of experiment 1 was to explore the modulation of behavioral and brain responses to low-level perspective taking by ostracism.Cyberball task was used to induce ostracism and visual perspective taking task was used to measure low-level perspective taking.The experiment had two within-subject factors: perspective(self vs.other)and consistency(consistent vs.inconsistent),and one between-subjects factor: group(rejection vs.control).Behavior results found increasing negative affect level and feelings of need-threat,decreased positive affect level after ostracism.For the reaction time(RT),ostracized group showed significantly longer RTs compared to control group in both perspective shifting and executive control.For the error rate,there was no significant difference between ostracized and control group.For the ERP components,temporal-parietal LSW showed less activation for the ostracized group than for the control group.Time-frequency analysis showed a lower power in ? band between 200 and 400 ms over parietal cortex for ostracized group than that for control group.Experiment 1 reflected that ostracism decreased executive control in visual perspective taking.The goal of experiment 2 was to investigate the modulation of behavioral and brain responses to low-level perspective taking by social rejection in real context.Get-acquainted paradigm was used to induce social rejection and visual perspective taking task was used to measure low-level perspective taking.The experiment had two within-subject factors: perspective(self vs.other)and consistency(consistent vs.inconsistent),and one between-subjects factor: group(rejection vs.control).Behavior results found increasing negative affect level and feelings of need-threat,decreased positive affect level after ostracism.There was no significant difference of RTs between rejection and control group.However,rejection group showed more error rate in visual perspective taking task compared to control group.For the ERP components,temporal-parietal LSW was less activated for the rejection group than for the control group.Moreover,compared with making judgments from self-perspective,making judgments from other-perspective yielded later TP450 and greater LFW.In addition,the LFW amplitude at left frontal area in other-inconsistent trials was more positive than that in other-consistent merely in rejection group.Time-frequency analysis showed a greater suppression of ? power under all conditions in rejection group.More importantly,rejection group showed greater ? power suppression when taking other's perspective,reflecting that social rejection increasing the activity of mirror neuron in visual perspective taking task.Experiment 2 demonstrated that social rejection increased the perspective shifting in visual perspective taking.The goal of experiment 3 was to investigate the modulation of behavioral and brain responses to high-level perspective taking by ostracism.Cyberball task was used to induce ostracism and communicative task was used to measure high-level perspective taking.The experiment had two within-subject factors: director(director present vs.director absent)and object(1-object vs.3-objects),and one between-subjects factor: group(rejection vs.control).Behavior results found increasing negative affect level and feelings of need-threat,decreased positive affect level after ostracism.For the reaction time,ostracized group showed significantly longer RTs compared to control group.For the ERP components,LFW amplitude was more negative-going in control group compared to the ostracized group under director present-3-objects conditions.Moreover,the temporal-parietal LSW and TP450 showed greater amplitudes under 3-objects condition than under 1-object condition control group,but this difference was not significantly in ostracized group.Time-frequency analysis showed a greater suppression of ? power in ostracized group during communicative task,reflecting that participants recruited many mental resources to processing social information and pay more attention to social cues to reason about the intentions of others.Experiment 3 demonstrated that ostracism increased the intention understanding,especially for perspective shifting.The goal of experiment 4 was to investigate the modulation of behavioral and brain responses to high-level perspective taking by social rejection in real context.Get-acquainted paradigm was used to induce social rejection and communicative task was used to measure high-level perspective taking.The experiment had two within-subject factors: director(director present vs.director absent)and object(1-object vs.3-objects),and one between-subjects factor: group(rejection vs.control).Behavior results found increasing negative affect level and feelings of need-threat,decreased positive affect level after social rejection.Both reaction time and error rate showed no significant difference between rejection and control group.The mean amplitude of LFW showed a main effect of object merely in control group.The late temporal-parietal LSW showed more positive-going amplitudes in control group than rejection group.Time-frequency analysis showed a significant ? suppression in both rejection and control group.In addition,there was a greater ? band power in control group compared to rejection group under 3-objections condition.Experiment 4demonstrated that individuals would recruit more mental resources to imagination and reasoning of others' perspective or intention.However,the cognitive processing of imagination and reasoning in perspective taking would be affected by negative emotion due to social rejection.In summary,this study adopted ostracism and rejection paradigms independently,and systematically discussed the effect of social exclusion on perspective taking,which is the core component of intention understanding.We found influence of exile social exclusion on low level intention understanding is shown in the dimension of execution control,while influence of reject social exclusion on low level intention understanding is manifested in the dimension of perspective shifting.Additionally,influence of exile social exclusion on high level intention understanding is shown in the dimension of deduction,while influence of reject social exclusion on low level intention understanding is manifested in both the dimension of deduction and execution control.In the future,research should combine other advanced cognitive neuroscience techniques and experimental patterns to further explore the mechanisms of how social exclusion affects intention understanding processing. |
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