The Effect Of Social Exclusion And Cold On Social Pain

Social exclusion is a widespread social phenomenon, such as being excluded by students at school, ignored by close family and suffering interpersonal friction at work etc.. Social exclusion can lead to social pain,also it will increase negative emotion, cause depression and anxiety, and hinder a sense of belonging, which will bring about destructive consequence for individual’s physical and mental health. At present, most of the researchers take the social exclusion as a simple phenomenon to study, and they pay more attention to the common impact of all the exclusion phenomenon like studying computer game exclusion in laboratory and ‘strangers’ exclusion’. However, there are few people classifying the social exclusion into specific context in our daily life, such as social exclusion phenomenon between friends, family and couples. In addition, embodied cognition is a hot topic in the field of psychology. Its theory emphasizes that the body plays an important role in cognitive process. Many researchers find temperature experiencing can affect the perception of social emotion. However, social pain is a complex concept,which contains a variety of social emotion. Therefore, the study of this thesis will combine embodied cognition with social exclusion to explore the influence of cold experiencing on social pain under the specific context of social exclusion.Our objectives were 240 university students who were randomly chosen from HuNan Normal University. The pre-experiment was a single factor between-subjects design, which aimed at testing the effectiveness of word activating. The formal experiment was a 2(social exclusion: rejected by strangers VS. rejected by close people)X2(temperature experiencing :cold VS.warm) between-subjects design, which used the methods of temperature operating from Ziyan Luan(2013)and imagination paradigm of social exclusion for references. What’s more, this study would take experimental method and use statistics method like analysis of variance conducted by SPSS to explore the effect of social exclusion and cold on social pain. The experimental results show that:(1)Different situation of social exclusion had different impact on social pain. Compared to exclusion from strangers, close other-induced ostracism conditions could increase more negative emotions and sense of rejection, and lower self-esteem.(2)In the close other-induced ostracism context, those who experienced cold could express more negative emotion and sense of rejection.