Effects of two different social exclusion paradigms on ambiguous facial emotion recognition

ABSTRACT

Social exclusion is an emotionally painful experience that leads to various alterations in socio-emotional processing. The perceptual and emotional consequences that may arise from experiencing social exclusion can vary depending on the paradigm used to manipulate it. Exclusion paradigms can vary in terms of the severity and duration of the leading exclusion experience, thereby classifying it as either a short-term or long-term experience. The present study aimed to study the impact of exclusion on socio-emotional processing using different paradigms that caused experiencing short-term and imagining long-term exclusion. Ambiguous facial emotions were used as socio-emotional cues. In study 1, the Ostracism Online paradigm was used to manipulate short-term exclusion. In study 2, a new sample of participants imagined long-term exclusion through the future life alone paradigm. Participants of both studies then completed a facial emotion recognition task consisting of morphed ambiguous facial emotions. By means of Point of Subjective Equivalence analyses, our results indicate that the experience of short-term exclusion hinders recognising happy facial expressions. In contrast, imagining long-term exclusion causes difficulties in recognising sad facial expressions. These findings extend the current literature, suggesting that not all social exclusion paradigms affect socio-emotional processing similarly.

KEYWORDS:

• Social exclusion
• socio-emotional processing
• ambiguous facial expressions
• Ostracism Online paradigm
• future life alone paradigm

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Pedram Behroozi for his technical advice in redesigning the Farsi version of the Ostracism Online paradigm.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available upon reasonable request from the corresponding author.

Additional information

Funding

The present research was supported by a grant from the Cognitive Science & Technologies Council of Iran (Vice-Presidency for Science and Technology).