Does emotion differentiation moderate aggressive responses to social exclusion? A novel approach for coping with social pain

Social exclusion is commonly associated with aggression because it causes people to interpret others' ambiguous behavior as aggressive. Factors linked to greater sensitivity to internal and situational emotion cues may then weaken the relationship between social exclusion and aggression. The current work explored one factor associated with sensitivity to emotional cues---one's capacity for differentiating emotions into discrete categories---that may inhibit aggressive responses among excluded people. Two experiments (N = 436) tested the hypothesis that emotion differentiation would weaken the relationship between social exclusion and aggression. In Study 1, I predicted that among participants who vividly recalled a past rejection experience, those who trained to differentiate their emotions more would exhibit a weaker hostile cognitive bias than those who trained to differentiate their emotions less. I predicted that this relationship would be mediated by increased activation of working memory. In Study 2, I predicted that among excluded participants, those who trained to differentiate their emotions more would exhibit less behavioral aggression compared to those who trained to be low differentiators. I predicted that this relationship would be sequentially mediated by an increase in activation of working memory and a decrease in hostile cognitive bias. The predicted moderating effect of emotion differentiation was not supported in either study. Implications are discussed.;KEYWORDS: Social Exclusion, Emotion, Working Memory, Hostile Cognition, Aggression.