Regulatory focus and social reconnection following social exclusion

ABSTRACT

Promotion- and prevention-focused people are differentially sensitive to situational gains and losses, thus we reasoned that people’s state regulatory focus following social exclusion should influence whether a social reconnection opportunity is perceived as safe (i.e., will exclusion persist or abate). To create an exclusion condition, all participants believed that other ostensible participants read their personal essay and chose not to work with them (i.e., all participants were excluded). Following the exclusion, participants rated how much they wanted to work with a new partner whose personality was depicted as a safe or unsafe reconnection opportunity. We expected and found that participants who held a prevention focus were willing to work with the partner, but only when the opportunity was perceived as safe. By comparison, participants who held a promotion focus were willing to work with the partner regardless of the opportunity’s safety. The relationship between social reconnection safety and regulatory focus and its effect on social reconnection efforts is discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Regulatory focus
• social exclusion
• rejection
• social reconnection

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/bcdva/(DOI10.17605/OSF.IO/BCDVA).

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Materials. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/bcdva/(DOI10.17605/OSF.IO/BCDVA).

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there are no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. The stopping point for data collection was the end of the academic semester.

2. The following path can be used to access the research materials: https://osf.io/bcdva/(DOI10.17605/OSF.IO/BCDVA).

3. Following previous work (e.g., Bohns et al., 2013; Scholer et al., 2014) we created the promotion-prevention difference by subtracting prevention focus from promotion focus; greater positive numbers indicate a stronger promotion focus.

4. Adding rejection sensitivity as a covariate had no effect on the results; B =.03, t(151) = 0.69, p =.494, 95%CI [−.057,.118]. The data that support this study’s findings are available from the corresponding author (JT), upon request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine E. Adams

Katherine Adams, PhD, is a recent doctoral graduate student in social psychology at Purdue University. Her research focuses on gratitude and well-being.

James M. Tyler

James Tyler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. Dr. Tyler examines aspects of positive emotion, wellbeing, and belonging in conjunction with the self and self-relevant behaviors.