Effects Of Social Exclusion On Self-focused Attention

Social exclusion is generally defined as the need of people’s belongingness and socialrelationships, which is thwarted owing to being excluded by a group or other people. Relevantresearches suggest that social exclusion may affect the cognition, emotion and behavior. Duringa social event, people are often disturbed by the environment. So self-focused attention may beaffected by the negative social exclusion. There are two types of explicit and implicitself-focused attention. It is anticipated that social exclusion affects the different types ofself-focused attention. And that, power refers to the notion that is as asymmetric control overvaluable resources and outcomes within a specific situation and set of social relations. Based onthese we expect that power has an influence on the relationship between social exclusion andself-focused attention as the moderating variable.Chinese college students were selected as participants. In Experiment1, the aim was toexplore the effect of social exclusion on self-focused attention. The experiment was adopted2(exclusion situation: the recall vs. the real)2(exclusion type: the ignored vs. the rejected)between-group design.80students were selected and grouped into four types of experimentcondition randomly. The number of the subjects was20in each group. In the recall-ignored andrecall-rejected condition, the subjects must write the experience of being excluded. While in thereal-ignored and real-rejected condition, the subjects were informed that they were joining in anactivity to set up the real situation. After that, all the subjects evaluated the sense of exclusion bythemselves. Then they would write the scale of self-focused attention and finished Stroop Testfor the implicit measurement. The results showed that both the recall and the real socialexclusion had a significant influence on the explicit and implicit self-focused attention. Theignored had higher self-focused attention in contrast to the rejected. The findings providedsupport for the hypothesis that social exclusion affected the self-focused attention. Based onExperiment1, Experiment2further explored the role of power in the relationship between socialexclusion and self-focused attention. This experiment used word-search test priming power,which was a common kind paradigm of power’s priming.180college students were randomlyassigned to any one of the experimental groups. It was a2(exclusion type: the ignored vs. therejected) x3(power type: the high vs. the low vs. the medium) x2(exclusion situation: the recallvs. the real) between-group design experiment. The subjects operated test of power’s primingafter social exclusion task. The results showed that, for the explicit self-focused attention, themain effect of social exclusion and power was significant and the interaction was also significant.Under the ignored condition, high power individuals’ self-focused attention was lower than medium and low power individuals. For the implicit self-focused attention, the main effect ofsocial exclusion and power was significant, and the ignored had higher self-focused attentionthan who were rejected; high power had lower self-focused attention than who had medium andlow power, but there was no the interaction. We conclude that power mediates the relationshipbetween ignored social exclusion and explicit self-focused attention.