Social pain and the role of imagined social consequences: Why personal adverse experiences elicit social pain, with or without explicit relational devaluation
Section snippets
What is social pain?
Social pain has been conceptualized as an adaptive neurobiological signal that alerts people to loss or damage in their social networks. Neuroimaging studies have shown that experiences such as exclusion or rejection activate similar brain areas as physically painful experiences (Onoda et al., 2010; see Eisenberger, 2012 for review). Researchers believe that during our evolutionary history, physical pain signals may have become co-opted to signal social injury and motivate individuals to repair
Which contexts elicit social pain?
Theoretical models contend that social pain is elicited by social and relational contexts in which social loss or disruption has occurred and, in the case of “hurt feelings” specifically, when this loss or disruption is due to another person devaluing the relationship (Leary & Springer, 2000). As such, researchers have commonly induced social pain by designing experimental contexts in which participants experience explicit relational devaluation (e.g., rejection or criticism) through direct
Method
In the following section, we report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, all manipulations, and all measures collected in the study.
Online games
Results indicated that participants understood and interpreted the online game manipulations in accordance with our expectations. Relative to those in the social inclusion Cyberball task, participants in the explicit relational devaluation condition were more likely to respond that the ball was thrown to them “much less frequently than it was to other participants,” t(166) = 10.672, p < .001, CI [1.57, 2.28], d = 1.53. and less likely to respond that the ball was thrown to them “about as
Discussion
Social pain has been conceptualized as a specific type of cognitive/emotional response that is elicited uniquely by loss or damage to a social connection, and in particular, when someone else inflicts that loss or damage—otherwise known as relational devaluation (e.g., DeWall et al., 2009; Twenge et al., 2001). Based on the sociometer theory of self-esteem, we hypothesized that personal adverse events that do not involve explicit relational devaluation—but could hold such potential—might have a
Funding
Funded by: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
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