Social exclusion modulates social processing: a behavioural dissociation between facial expressions and gaze direction

Social exclusion has been proven to drive aggressive behaviours and to create emotional numbness. It also seems to facilitate implicit processing of positive emotions and enhance re-inclusion finalised behaviours. These effects seem to be mediated by the individual’s empathy. Nevertheless, the effects of social exclusion on emotions and social information processing are unclear. This study aims to test whether exclusion can improve social processing (i.e., emotion recognition and gaze direction discrimination), and whether this can be modulated by empathy. Young adult participants (M = 15; F =15) were asked to identify either the emotional [removed] happy, sad, angry, fearful) or gaze direction (direct vs. averted gaze) of photographed faces after social exclusion (or inclusion) through the Cyberball paradigm. Empathy had previously been estimated through the Empathy Quotient questionnaire. Experimental results on response times show that social exclusion slows down emotion identification, but not gaze direction discrimination. Interestingly, higher empathy was associated with a stronger enhancement of social processing in excluded rather than included participants: when excluded, participants with higher empathy scores enhanced the recognition of emotion and discrimination of gaze direction, while for participants with lower empathy scores exclusion made their performance worse in both tasks. When included, participants with higher empathy scores got faster RTs than other participants, in both tasks. This study brings new evidence indicating that social exclusion has an effect only on one of the two crucial social dimensions (emotion identification, but not gaze direction discrimination). Interestingly, empathy also modulates these effects in different ways. This suggests that more empathic people are more sensitive to rejection and pay much more attention to social information