When we experience damage to a social connection—in particular, perceiving that others have devalued our relationship with them—we experience “social pain.” Prior studies have typically examined social pain by creating explicit contexts to elicit experiences of relational devaluation. However, there may be other antecedents of social pain that do not involve direct threats to social belongingness. For example, personal failures, mistakes, or accidents that do not involve overt relational devaluation may also be socially painful because they can damage self-esteem—a marker of the self-perceived value we bring to all of our relationships. In the present study, 739 online participants were randomly assigned to imagine or experience events in one of three conditions: social inclusion, personal adversity with explicit relational devaluation (e.g., social rejection), or personal adversity without explicit relational devaluation (e.g., failing an exam). Participants were exposed to these experiences in one of three possible ways: by writing about a past memory, participating in an online game, or writing about an imagined future scenario. Well-established self-reported measures of social pain were administered following the assigned task. Results demonstrated that the personal adversity conditions, both with and without explicit relational devaluation, evoked consistently more social pain across measures than inclusion but generally did not differ from one another. These findings suggest that even when it has not been made explicit, relational devaluation may be socially painful by virtue of threatening self-esteem, supporting the notion that many of our life experiences, independent or relational, are imbued with social significance.

当我们经历对社交关系的破坏时，尤其是感知到他人贬低了我们与他们之间的关系时，我们会经历“社交痛苦”。先前的研究通常通过创建明确的背景来引发关系贬值的经验来研究社会痛苦。但是，可能还有其他社会痛苦的前因，但并不涉及对社会归属感的直接威胁。例如，不涉及明显的人际关系贬值的个人失败，错误或意外，也可能在社会上令人痛苦，因为它们会损害自尊，这是我们为我们所有关系带来的自我感知价值的标志。在本研究中，随机分配了739位在线参与者来想象或体验以下三种情况之一中的事件：社会包容，具有明显关系贬值的个人逆境（例如，社会排斥）或没有明确关系贬值（例如，考试不及格）的个人逆境。参与者可以通过以下三种可能的方式之一来接触这些经验：写过去的记忆，参加在线游戏或想象未来的情景。在完成指定任务后，将执行完善的自我报告的社交疼痛度量。结果表明，无论有没有明确的亲属贬值，个人的逆境在各种措施上都比起包容性总是引起更多的社会痛苦，但总体上彼此之间没有什么不同。这些发现表明，即使没有明确表述，关系贬值也可能由于威胁自尊而在社会上造成痛苦，这支持了我们许多生活经历，