The Effects of Imagining and Experiencing Ostracism on Pain Perception

Abstract

This article included 2 experiments to investigate the short-term pain recovery following imagined and directly experienced social threats in healthy adult college samples. Experiment 1 showed that, when participants imagined ostracism, as opposed to inclusion, they expected more immediate physical pain outcomes, although they expected this physical discomfort to dissipate within a few minutes (ps < .05). Experiment 2 found that, when individuals directly experienced ostracism, they reported more pain than when they experienced inclusion; however, this pain reverted to baseline levels within 20 minutes of the social threat (ps < .05). Overall, data from these 2 experiments provide support of the physical pain-social pain overlap literature that social pain does indeed “hurt” but that the pain resolves within 20 minutes.