Social exclusion affects infants’ neural processing of emotional faces

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Social exclusion is a very aversive feeling, as it threatens important psychological needs such as self-esteem and belongingness (Williams & Nida, 2011). It has been shown that social exclusion often induces considerable physiological (Bass et al., 2014; Iffland et al., 2014), cognitive (Kawamoto et al., 2014) and behavioral (Bourgeois & Hess, 2008; Lakin et al., 2008) changes in adults. Yet, only few studies investigated children and infants’ cognitive capacities (Marinović & Träuble, 2018) and behavior (Over & Carpenter, 2009; Watson-Jones et al., 2014) after being exposed to third party social ostracism. Moreover, little is known about children and infants’ response to self-experienced social exclusion.
The current study investigates the influence of self-experienced social exclusion on 13-month-olds’ neural processing of emotional faces. To do so, each infant first participated in a live ball-tossing game with two experimenters, named Cyberball game (Scheithauer et al., 2013), during which he/she was either included or excluded in the game. In the inclusion condition, infants received the ball a third of the time during the whole game, while infants in the exclusion condition only received the ball twice at the beginning and were then ignored for the rest of the game. Just after the exposure to the Cyberball game, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while infants observed dynamic stimuli of faces expressing anger, fear and happiness.
Preliminary analyses were performed (N=9) by conducting a repeated-measures ANOVA on ERPs mean amplitudes, with Emotion (happiness, fear and anger) and Hemisphere (left, right) as within-subjects factor and Condition (inclusion, exclusion) as a between-participants factor. The ANOVA performed on the Nc mean amplitude revealed a main effect of Emotion, p = .039 and a main effect of Condition, p = .009, but no main effect of Hemisphere or further interactions (all ps > .24). Post-hoc t-tests revealed a significantly larger Nc amplitude for the inclusion condition (M = -9.90 μV; SD = 2.05) as compared to the exclusion condition (M = -6.10 μV; SD = 1.15) p= .009 (Figure 1). In addition, analyses revealed a significantly larger Nc mean amplitude for fearful faces (M = -9.74 μV; SD = 4.38) as compared to angry faces (M = -6.07 μV; SD = 2.38), p = .013, and marginally larger Nc mean amplitude for fearful faces as compared to happy faces (M = -7.54 μV; SD = 2.85), p= .099 (Figure 2). No significant differences were observed in relation to N290 and P400 amplitudes (all ps > .28).
These preliminary results suggest that self-experienced social exclusion influences infants’ neural processing of emotional faces, as illustrated by their larger allocation of attention towards emotional faces after inclusion versus exclusion. In addition, an attentional bias towards fearful faces emerged both after inclusion and exclusion. Data collection just resumed, and additional 20 participants should be tested by April 2021 and included in the final analysis.

Authors

• Julia Mermier, University of Milano-Bicocca
  Presenting Author

• Ermanno Quadrelli, University of Milan-Bicocca
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hermann Bulf, University of Milano-Bicocca
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chiara Turati, Univesrità di Milano-Bicocca
  Non-Presenting Author