Abstract
Previous social exclusion experiments identified two factors affecting the participants’ evaluation of participation in a virtual ball tossing game (cyberball): ball reception probability and vertical position of the participant’s avatar on the screen. The P3 component in the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) indicated that both factors moderate subjective expectancies on social participation. The present research builds on an expectancy model explaining these effects and tests whether its predictions – established in a within-participant design – also hold in a between-participant design more common in behavioral cyberball studies. Participants were randomly assigned to four conditions which differed in ball reception probability (16% vs. 26%) and the avatar’s vertical position (inferior vs. superior). To track the state of expectancy of involvement online, we recorded the ERP response evoked by ball receptions of the participant. Retrospectively, social involvement and social need threat were rated in a questionnaire. As hypothesized, low ball reception probability elicited enlarged P3 amplitudes in the ERPs, increased negative mood, and threatened social needs. For participants at inferior position, ERP and questionnaire effects were less expressed. This effect of verticality can be traced back to an adjustment in the expected involvement as signaled by a differential adaptation of the P3 amplitude within an experimental run. These results confirm that the predictions of an expectancy model also apply to cyberball studies using a between-participant design. However, the comparison with the results of previous within-participant design studies suggests that the sensitivity of the adjustment processes critically depends on the choice of the experimental design.
Highlights
Being neglected in social interaction is an aversive experience
The present research tested the prediction of an expectancy violation account on the processing of social exclusion in a between-participant design
The self-report data confirm the differences in sensitivity for exclusion depending on the choice of the experimental design: Combining the four Need Threat Questionnaire (NTQ) scales, we observed a mean “probability” effect of 0.641 indicating a moderate effect size (η2p = 0.205) in the between-participant design of the present study
Summary
Being neglected in social interaction is an aversive experience. It directly impacts our affective state (Twenge et al, 2001) and mental health (Macdonald and Leary, 2005). To examine the psychological consequences of social exclusion, Williams et al (2000) introduced the cyberball paradigm which simulates exclusion in a virtual ball tossing game (see Figure 1A). A recent meta-analysis (Hartgerink et al, 2015), based on 120 cyberball studies, confirmed the reliability of the exclusionary effect on self-reports, and estimated a large effect size (d > 1.4). As a consequence of the reliable exclusion effects and their large effect size that could be retrieved with this easy to implement paradigm, cyberball emerged as the gold standard in experimental research on the effects of social exclusion. The paradigm has been used beyond the field of Social Psychology, for instance in Clinical Psychology (Renneberg et al, 2012; Engel et al, 2016; Fung and Alden, 2017), Developmental Psychology (Pharo et al, 2011; Will et al, 2013; Wolfer and Scheithauer, 2013), or Health Psychology (Stock et al, 2013; Pieritz et al, 2017)
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