The Influence Of Ostracism On Working Memory

Ostracism is one of the most ubiquitous and powerful means of social control. It is considered as sources of evolution. For the groups, ostracism can enhance group cohesion and make them easier to survive. However, for the ostracized person, ostracism will undoubtedly be a grievous blow, and even a fetal injury. So far, a lot of psychological research from different angles has proved that ostracism has negative impact on individuals. For example, ostracism will lead to increase ones’negative emotions, reduce four kinds of fundamental needs (sense of belonging, control, meaningful existence, self-esteem) of them, increase their aggressive behavior, decrease both the speed and accuracy of rational thinking significantly and make it harder to inhibit prepotent responses. While other researchers have found that ostracism is beneficial to the individual. For those who have suffered from social exclusion, their ability of detecting conflict has been enhanced, and simple information processing ability remains intact. Furthermore, their performance on creative tasks is better than that of those from socially acceptable group. Therefore, exclusion does not lead to negative influence on all fronts. Working memory (WM) as an important aspect of cognitive function plays a key role in one’s daily life, such as language comprehension, completion of learning, reasoning, thinking and other complex cognitive tasks. Will WM be damaged after ostracism? Currently, very few studies have systematically explored this issue. This research puts an eye on WM, and attempts to investigate the influence of ostracism on WM systematically through two experiments.Experiment1was designed to explore the effect of ostracism on individual verbal WM. The experimental session started with an internet ball-tossing game named Cyberball, was used to induce interpersonal situations of social exclusion. Participants were told that they would be playing a game of’catch-and-throw’with two other participants over the internet, although the other players were in fact simulated by the computer. And the real participants were randomly assigned to the exclusion or the inclusion condition. Then, a digital n-back paradigm was used to examine the ability of verbal WM of subjects. And during the experiment, the post-Cyberball questionnaire and biofeedback instrument were used to monitor effectiveness of ostracism. The results of questionnaire showed that the self-reported levels of the excluded participants on four basic needs were significantly lower than the included ones. Besides, the excluded subjects scored significantly lower than the included control on positive emotion, and their negative emotion score was significantly higher than the included. The physiological feedback data found that during the Cyberball game, the skin conductance level (SCL) of the excluded subjects was higher than the included ones, with higher physical arousal. The above two results proved that Cyberball did induce social exclusion. In addition, the behavioral data showed that the excluded subjects performed significantly worse than the included control in the high-load digital WM task (2-back), with significantly lower accuracy (Acc), but there were no differences between two groups in low-load task (1-back).The goal of Experiment2was to investigate the influence of ostracism on individual spatial WM. Experiment2applied almost the same method with Experiment1, except replacing the verbal n-back paradigm into a spatial n-back paradigm. The results of questionnaire and physiological feedback showed that social exclusion were induced successfully as well in Experiment2. The behavioral results showed that excluded subjects had significantly lower Acc than the included control in high-load spatial WM task (2-back), but there were no differences between two groups in low-load task (1-back).In conclusion, this study proved a negative impact of ostracism on high load WM to some degree through two experiments. Subjects who experienced social exclusion performed worse in high-load (2-back) working memory (digital&spatial) tasks than included controls, with lower accuracy. The harm of ostracism to individual cannot be overlooked. A good social environment is very important to the healthy growth of individuals.