Age Differences In Ostracism And Its Impact

Ostracism, which is a common social phenomenon, is a hampered phenomenon and processes of human’s belonging and relationship needs when an individual is ignored, excluded or rejected by a particular social group or other individuals. It has multiple manifestations, such as exclusion, rejection, isolation, ignoring and so on. Although research in this area have been conducted from last mid-century, their number and quality are not satisfactory. Until the 1990s, the scholars start to have more knowledge on this area, and an increasing number of researchers were engaging to explore the effect of ostracism and its possible impact factors.As a cold violence, its disadvantages outweigh its advantages, although ostracism allows individuals to rethink their social network and behaviours to some extent. Existing studies have found that ostracism can cause a serious negative impact on the development of young individuals’physical and mental status, such as reducing the self-esteem, belonging, existence and a sense of control; in terms of emotion, it will bring them a sense of sad feeling. More importantly, people who expose to ostracism in a long run are easy to feel loneliness, depression and even mental disorders. Despite the progress of present research, there is still less research concerning on older adults who are easier to access to ostracism.The former research has found that there are age differences in the impact of ostracism. That is, the old tends to report less negative feelings when they suffered ostracism compared to the young. However, the age differences have a serious conflict on the extent of ostracism. Given the importance of relationship between age differences and extent of ostracism has been neglected by former researcher, it is important to take further step to detect the age difference in the impact of ostracism, especially considering the relationship. Meanwhile, the results of explanation for this age differences are not consistent as well. From the limited research, one of them believed individuals’ processing speed can account for the age difference; the other thought positive bias among older adults is the reason for it. However, the former has some problems on its measurements and the latter has a serious cross-culture difference, requiring the researcher to rethink the proper explanation on the age differences and give more quantity evidence.The present research takes two experiments to explore the age differences among the impact of ostracism and its probable explanation. In experiment one, we detected whether the age differences in ostracism is existed or not, and whether level of ostracism has a significant effect on the age differences. Ultimately, there are 337 subjects enrolled by posters, involving 165 young people (M=20.45, SD=1.26) and 172 older people (M=64.18, SD=6.18). We adopted a 2*5 with-in subject design, explored the classical Cyberball task to create different levels of ostracism, and found out the significant age differences in which level of ostracism. In experiment two, we explored the proper explanation of the age differences. By inducing implicit research methods, we detected the social networks hypothesis, computer sociality hypothesis, rejection sensitivity hypothesis, loneliness hypothesis, positivity bias hypothesis, and impression management hypothesis. Finally, we enrolled 29 young adults (M=21.79, SD=1.88) and 33 older adults (M=61.15, SD=5.69),62 participants in total. Employing the most apparently level of ostracism as the experimental condition, recording the physical indexes by Sprite-8 biofeedback equipment, and using regression analysis figure out the proper explanations of age differences on the effect of ostracism.We found that:(1) Only under apparent ostracism condition, the effect of ostracism will occur age differences, that is older adults will experience more positive feeling than young adults.(2) Positive bias of self-regulation will explain the age differences on the effects of ostracism.