Fear of negative evaluation moderates effects of social exclusion on selective attention to social signs

Abstract

Previous studies demonstrated that fear of negative evaluation (FNE) moderates responses to exclusion in late-stage social outcomes (e.g., social judgements and behaviours). People with low levels of FNE show affiliative responses, feeling compelled to recover their sense of belonging, whereas people with high levels of FNE do not. This study examined whether FNE also moderates responses to exclusion in early-stage interpersonal perception, manifested in selective attention. The experiment using a dot-probe task revealed that exclusion led participants with low levels of FNE to increase attention to signs of social acceptance (i.e., smiling faces). It also revealed that exclusion led those with high levels of FNE to pay more attention to signs of social threat (i.e., angry faces) relative to those of social acceptance. Thus, exclusion makes the motivation to protect oneself from social threats dominant over the motivation to reestablish social bonds among those who fear negative evaluation.

Keywords:

• Social exclusion
• Fear of negative evaluation
• Selective attention

Notes

¹ Participants were not preselected intentionally based on scores for SFNE.

² ATR-Promotions (2006) had 27 university students rate each picture of ATR Facial Expression Image Database DB99 according to how happy and angry it was on 7-point scales (1 = not at all, 7 = extremely). The mean scores on happiness and anger for each emotional type were as follows: 6.16 and 1.22 for smiling faces; 1.16 and 5.67 for angry faces; and 1.91 and 1.55 for neutral faces, respectively.

³ We employed regression analysis or hierarchical linear model instead of analysis of variance (ANOVA) because ANOVA cannot deal with a continuous independent variable (SFNE scores).

⁴ The random slope of face type was not added because it did not improve the model.