Social Exclusion Lead To The Attentional Bias To Social Accept Information

The desire for positive and lasting relationships is among the most pervasive and fundamental of human needs. Failure to satisfy one’s need to belong can have damaging effects on cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and health outcomes. Actually, there is mounting evidences suggest that the threat of social exclusion activates mechanisms designed for the detection and regulation of physical pain. Social exclusion is very common in our social life. Many people may have been excluded by others or a particular social group, thus, in light of the significant impact of Social exclusion on our psychology and behavior,we should put more effort to investigate themechanism behind it.Given this fundamental need to belong, we might expect that beingthreatened by exclusion could increase attention to signs of socialthreat (e.g., angry faces), Exclusion conceivably could cause people to become hyper vigilant to the possibility of additional exclusion or rejection, and therefore, people threatened by exclusion could become highly attentive to aspects of the social environment that denote social threat or disapproval. On the basis of this reasoning, one might expect that the threat of social exclusion would increase attention to faces displaying expressions of anger which can communicate social threat and disapproval. Another possible alternative hypothesis is that the experience of social exclusion can double their interest in restoring their sense of belonging and promote increased interest in attaining social acceptance, like smiling, welcoming faces. Indeed, there is an essential tension between wanting to seek social acceptance and wanting to avoid the possibility of rejection. The social world is extremely complex, with numerous stimuli competing for attention, however, people’s cognitive resources are limited, therefore, Cognitive resources are frequently, and quite automatically allocated to features in the environment that are related to specific adaptive goals. Given the fundamental need for social belonging and the apparent desire to fulfill that need following the threat of social exclusion, we hypothesized that the threat of exclusion would increase attention to other people displaying cues that signal a high likelihood of social acceptance.The’inhibition of return (IOR)’, first described in1984, refers to the delayed response times to targets presented at the previously attended locations or objects as compared to the novel ones. It has been considered as a mechanism that encourages orienting towards novel locations in the visual field so as to facilitate visual searching efficiency.The sensitive to angry face allows us to find the inhibition of return effect of angry face. Therefore, in this research, we assumed that social exclusion would lead to the inhibition of return effect of smile faces rather than the inhibition of return effect of angry faces, because the threat of social exclusion would increase interest in attaining social acceptance. However, social acceptance would generate the inhibition of return effect of angry faces rather than the inhibition of return effect of smile faces, because social acceptance group are more sensitive to the threat information of angry faces. However, there is no research explored the sensitivity to accept information would lead to the inhibition of return effect of smile faces.The facial expression of the target face was manipulated and included smiling, sad, and angry expressions. The threat of a social exclusion was manipulated by a procedure developed by Maner, De-Wall, and colleagues to cause them to be rejected immediately. Participants viewed and sent video messages to a same-sex confederate with whom a future interaction was anticipated. Some participants were told that their partner had to leave unexpectedly and would not be able to meet them. Others were informed that their partner refused to work with them. Thus, the interaction was cut short in both conditions, but only in the social exclusion condition did participants believe it was specifically due to a negative evaluation of the participant. The dot-probe task was used to measure the attention bias.As for experiment one, The ANOVA for RT indicated that RTs were significantly shorter for social exclusion group when the target face was "smile" relative to "neutral" and "angry", and the RTs were significantly shorter for social acceptance group when the target face was "angry" relative to "neutral" and "smile", which suggested that the threat of social exclusion increased the sensitive to social acceptance information(smile faces). The results of experiment two further indicated that social exclusion lead to the inhibition of return effect of smile faces because the threat of social exclusion would increase interest in attaining social acceptance. Together, these findings suggested that social exclusion have attentional bias for social accept information compare to threat information. Base on the results of research one, research two further confirmed that the attentional bias for social accept information for exclused people derived from the alleviation effect of smile faces to psychological pain.