Social exclusion has been proven to drive aggressive behaviours and to create emotional numbness. It also seems to facilitate implicit processing of positive emotions and enhance re-inclusion finalised behaviours. These effects seem to be mediated by the individual’s empathy. Nevertheless, the effects of social exclusion on emotions and social information processing are unclear. This study aims to test whether exclusion can improve social processing (i.e., emotion recognition and gaze direction discrimination), and whether this can be modulated by empathy. Young adult participants (M = 15; F =15) were asked to identify either the emotional [removed] happy, sad, angry, fearful) or gaze direction (direct vs. averted gaze) of photographed faces after social exclusion (or inclusion) through the Cyberball paradigm. Empathy had previously been estimated through the Empathy Quotient questionnaire. Experimental results on response times show that social exclusion slows down emotion identification, but not gaze direction discrimination. Interestingly, higher empathy was associated with a stronger enhancement of social processing in excluded rather than included participants: when excluded, participants with higher empathy scores enhanced the recognition of emotion and discrimination of gaze direction, while for participants with lower empathy scores exclusion made their performance worse in both tasks. When included, participants with higher empathy scores got faster RTs than other participants, in both tasks. This study brings new evidence indicating that social exclusion has an effect only on one of the two crucial social dimensions (emotion identification, but not gaze direction discrimination). Interestingly, empathy also modulates these effects in different ways. This suggests that more empathic people are more sensitive to rejection and pay much more attention to social information

Bossi, F., Gallucci, M., Ricciardelli, P. (2015). Social exclusion modulates social processing: a behavioural dissociation between facial expressions and gaze direction. In 19th Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP) abstracts (pp.346-346).

Social exclusion modulates social processing: a behavioural dissociation between facial expressions and gaze direction

BOSSI, FRANCESCO
Primo
;
GALLUCCI, MARCELLO;RICCIARDELLI, PAOLA
Ultimo
2015

Abstract

Social exclusion has been proven to drive aggressive behaviours and to create emotional numbness. It also seems to facilitate implicit processing of positive emotions and enhance re-inclusion finalised behaviours. These effects seem to be mediated by the individual’s empathy. Nevertheless, the effects of social exclusion on emotions and social information processing are unclear. This study aims to test whether exclusion can improve social processing (i.e., emotion recognition and gaze direction discrimination), and whether this can be modulated by empathy. Young adult participants (M = 15; F =15) were asked to identify either the emotional [removed] happy, sad, angry, fearful) or gaze direction (direct vs. averted gaze) of photographed faces after social exclusion (or inclusion) through the Cyberball paradigm. Empathy had previously been estimated through the Empathy Quotient questionnaire. Experimental results on response times show that social exclusion slows down emotion identification, but not gaze direction discrimination. Interestingly, higher empathy was associated with a stronger enhancement of social processing in excluded rather than included participants: when excluded, participants with higher empathy scores enhanced the recognition of emotion and discrimination of gaze direction, while for participants with lower empathy scores exclusion made their performance worse in both tasks. When included, participants with higher empathy scores got faster RTs than other participants, in both tasks. This study brings new evidence indicating that social exclusion has an effect only on one of the two crucial social dimensions (emotion identification, but not gaze direction discrimination). Interestingly, empathy also modulates these effects in different ways. This suggests that more empathic people are more sensitive to rejection and pay much more attention to social information
abstract + poster
Perception of gaze direction, emotiional facial expressions, social exclusion,
English
Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP) - 17 – 20 September
2015
19th Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP) abstracts
2015
346
346
none
Bossi, F., Gallucci, M., Ricciardelli, P. (2015). Social exclusion modulates social processing: a behavioural dissociation between facial expressions and gaze direction. In 19th Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP) abstracts (pp.346-346).
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10281/98990
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