Effects Of Self-affirmation On Subjective And Behavioral Responses To Social Exclusion

Social exclusion was a phenomenon and process in which a person's belonging needs and relational needs were thwarted because of being excluded and rejected by a social group or some people, occuring in various patterns, such as exclusion, rejection, isolation and ostracism. Social exclusion was a common phenomenon in human society, which had a negative impact on both individuals and society, such as strong negative emotional responses, reduced positive emotional responses, lowered self-esteem. It not only seriously affected people's physical and mental well-being, but aslo influenced people's behaviors,' for example, the excluded people often attacked people who rejected them, even innocent people, which had a serious threat to public safety. Therefore, study on alleviating the negative influence of social exclusion appeared especially important. And there was less empirical studies on social exclusion in China, the existing research paradigms and research results of social exclusion from western countries needed to be validated under the background of China. Self-affirmation maintained or restored one's global positive self-integrity through affirming some important aspects of the self that was unrelated to the threatened domain in order to reduce defensive responses when the self was threatened. Self-affirmation restored the threatened self-integrity, and reduced the defensive reactions which was disadvantageous to the people themselves, made an objective and fair attitude towards threatening information possible, providing an opportunity to learn from the threatening information. The study of self-affirmation in China found Chinese aslo had a motivation to maintain self-integrity, and self-affirmation can also reduce the defensive reactions which often occurred in the face of threatening information. And theory researches and empirical researches provided a basis of the positive effects of self-affirmation on responses to social exclusion.Based on this, this study aimed to verify whether social exclusion arise the same negative influences in China, and seeked to study whether self-affirmation can buffer the negative responses of social exclusion. This study selected get acquainted paradigm to operate social exclusion, and selected social distress and aggression as dependent variables. The experiment one was to test whether social exclusion bring social distress and aggression in China. Firstly, the study tested the validity of the relationship closeness induction task and get acquainted paradigm. Secondly, the study investigated the influence of social exclusion on social distress and aggression. Four emotions including anger, sadness, hurt feelings, happiness and two self-esteem including communion self-esteem and agency self-esteem were selected as the index of social distress, hostile cognitive bias and aggressive behavior were selected as the index of aggressive cognition and aggressive behavior. Experiment two was to explore whether self-affirmation can buffer the negative influence of social exclusion. Values self-affirmation was selected as a measure operating self-affirmation, social distress and implicit aggression were selected as dependent variables. The experiment got the following results:(1) Social exclusion also brought social distress in the Chinese cultural background, for the excludeds'anger, sadness, hurt feelings increased, happiness decreased, communion self-esteem and agency self-esteem lowered too. However, social exclusion made the excludeds and accepteds have a higher hostile cognitive bias, but no aggressive behaviors, and the two groups had no difference between these two aggressive indicators.(2) Self-affirmation interventions were invalid in alleviating social distress, and the implicit aggression was not affected too. But the self-affirmation made the accepteds feel happier, more confident in their abilities, but their other emotions and implicit aggression were not affected.(3) Social exclusion may aslo had negative influence on accepteds who excluded other people at the same time, for the accepteds having the same level of hostile cognitive bias with the excludeds, and even having higher lever of implicit aggression than the excludeds.