Social pain and the role of imagined social consequences: Why personal adverse experiences elicit social pain, with or without explicit relational devaluation

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Abstract

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.

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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