Abstract
Eye gaze plays a fundamental role in social communication. The averted eye gaze during social interaction, as the most common form of silent treatment, conveys a signal of social exclusion. In the present study, we examined the time course of brain response to social exclusion by using a modified version of Eye-gaze paradigm. The event-related potentials (ERPs) data and the subjective rating data showed that the frontocentral P200 was positively correlated with negative mood of excluded events, whereas, the centroparietal late positive potential (LPP) was positively correlated with the perceived ostracism intensity. Both the P200 and LPP were more positive-going for excluded events than for included events. These findings suggest that brain responses sensitive to social exclusion can be divided into the early affective processing stage, linking to the early pre-cognitive warning system; and the late higher-order processes stage, demanding attentional resources for elaborate stimuli evaluation and categorization generally not under specific situation.
Highlights
In social life, everyone may experience exclusion from social relationship or social interaction, such as falling out of love, break-up with friends
The P200 The three-way repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the peak amplitudes of the P200 over gaze direction, row and laterality revealed a significant main effect of gaze direction, F(1,14) = 9.18, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.40, with the event-related potentials (ERPs) responses being more positive-going to the averted gaze (8.63 μV) than to the direct gaze (6.47 μV)
The simple-effect analysis showed that for each electrode row, the main effect of gaze direction was significant, p < 0.05, with the ERP responses being more positive to the averted gaze than to the direct, and such effect upon direct and averted gaze reached the maximum in the frontocentral area
Summary
Everyone may experience exclusion from social relationship or social interaction, such as falling out of love, break-up with friends. Considerable neuroimaging studies have reported that experience of social exclusion elicited by ball-tossing game (Eisenberger et al, 2003; Masten et al, 2009; DeWall et al, 2010; Bolling et al, 2011; Moor et al, 2012), negative social evaluation which involves receiving rejecting feedback from others (Eisenberger et al, 2011), and even the cues that represent social rejection (Kross et al, 2007), can activate affective physical pain-related neural regions including dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and anterior insula (AI). The cortical regions including superior temporal gyrus cortex, insula, ACC and subcortical regions including striatum, thalamus activated greatly after acceptance than after rejection feedback (Guyer et al, 2012)
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