Psychological and Neuroendocrine Reactivity to Ostracism

Abstract

This study used the ostracism detection theory to investigate how ostracism impacts individuals in two ways: (1) immediate poststressor needs, mood, ruminative thoughts, and desire to affiliate, and (2) short-term affective and cortisol reactivity. A total of 58 college students were randomly assigned to the inclusion or ostracism conditions of Cyberball, a virtual ball-tossing game. Immediately following the experimental manipulation, ostracized participants reported more thwarted psychological need states, more negative mood, and fewer positive ruminative thoughts, relative to their included counterparts. Ostracized participants reported a greater interest in affiliating with others in online or in-person settings. In the short-term, ostracized males reported more hostility than included males, although the scores were within expected norms for most males. There was no relation between Cyberball condition and gender across time for depression, anxiety, or positive affect. Approximately 20 min after the onset of the stressor, women in the luteal phase and women taking oral contraceptives in the ostracized group displayed higher cortisol than their counterparts in the included group. Relative to baseline, however, cortisol did not reliably increase after the onset of the stressor. Ostracized females taking oral contraceptives showed the greatest decline in cortisol, compared to included oral contraceptive users. Overall, results suggest that most of the negative effects of ostracism are immediate and limited to psychological, not neuroendocrine, responses.

Does inclusion after ostracism influence the persistence of affective distress?

“…The expected result from the Game 2 Wait condition in the current study is comparable to the delayed as sessment following a single game of Cyberball (Ostracism vs. Inclusion) observed in prior work showing a decrease in distress at 20-min delay simply by waiting and without any inclu sion intervention (Zwolinski, 2012). The addi tion of the Game 2 Inclusion condition allows a test of whether the benefit of inclusion facili tates coping more than the passage of time (waiting), immediately after Game 2 and then at 10-min delay.…”

“…In the last 15 years, numerous studies have demonstrated a range of distressing emotional, cognitive, behavioral, biological, and neural responses that occur immediately after ostracism (DeWall & Bushman, 2011) using different rejection/exclusion/ostracism paradigms. The Cyberball paradigm of ostra cism, in particular, has received considerable research attention, showing that with over 5,000 participants, even a brief (3-min) epi sode of ostracism is enough to produce acute 1 Although some researchers have made attempts to dif ferentiate the terms ostracism and social exclusion (Leary, 2005), most researchers use these terms interchangeably (as cited in Zwolinski, 2012). Given that the Cyberball para digm tests ostracism and that most of the literature cited in this paper is specific to Cyberball, for purposes of this paper the term ostracism will be used.…”

Contextual exclusion processing: an fMRI study of rejection in a performance-related context

“…Inclusion in the performance condition represents a powerful stressful situation and can hence not serve as an adequate control condition. For a future application of the Cyberball task as stress paradigm, the apposition of public performance evaluation seems to be encouraging and might thwart against the missing hormonal stress reaction on the Cyberball task reported in some studies (Seidel et al 2013;Zwolinski 2012).…”

Need to Belong, Not Rejection Sensitivity, Moderates Cortisol Response, Self-Reported Stress, and Negative Affect Following Social Exclusion

“…Salivary cortisol is an efficient way to measure the physiological stress response in experimental settings (Zwolinski, 2012), and is one biometric that is popular to measure in experimental social psychology -a field increasingly interested in objective measurement (e.g., Walla, Brenner, & Koller, 2011).…”