Social exclusion leads to attentional bias to emotional social information: Evidence from eye movement

• Published in: PloS one 2017-10, Vol.12 (10), p.e0186313-e0186313
• Main Authors: Chen, Zhuohao, Du, Jinchen, Xiang, Min, Zhang, Yan, Zhang, Shuyue
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Analysis; Attentional Bias; Behavior; Bias; Biology and Life Sciences; Comparative analysis; Computer and Information Sciences; Eating disorders; Emotional factors; Emotions; Experimental psychology; Experiments; Eye; Eye movements; Eye Movements - physiology; Facial Expression; Female; Fixation; Humans; Latency; Male; Medical research; Medicine and Health Sciences; Personality; Pictures; Reaction Time; Response time; Self esteem; Social Behavior; Social exclusion; Social learning; Social marginality; Social psychology; Social Sciences; Studies; Teacher education
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0186313

Social exclusion has many effects on individuals, including the increased need to belong and elevated sensitivity to social information. Using a self-reporting method, and an eye-tracking technique, this study explored people's need to belong and attentional bias towards the socio-emotional information (pictures of positive and negative facial expressions compared to those of emotionally-neutral expressions) after experiencing a brief episode of social exclusion. We found that: (1) socially-excluded individuals reported higher negative emotions, lower positive emotions, and stronger need to belong than those who were not socially excluded; (2) compared to a control condition, social exclusion caused a longer response time to probe dots after viewing positive or negative face images; (3) social exclusion resulted in a higher frequency ratio of first attentional fixation on both positive and negative emotional facial pictures (but not on the neutral pictures) than the control condition; (4) in the social exclusion condition, participants showed shorter first fixation latency and longer first fixation duration to positive pictures than neutral ones but this effect was not observed for negative pictures; (5) participants who experienced social exclusion also showed longer gazing duration on the positive pictures than those who did not; although group differences also existed for the negative pictures, the gaze duration bias from both groups showed no difference from chance. This study demonstrated the emotional response to social exclusion as well as characterising multiple eye-movement indicators of attentional bias after experiencing social exclusion.