E-ISSN : 2733-4538
The Social Reconnection Hypothesis suggests that social exclusion may trigger a desire in people to form bonds with others in order to satisfy their need to belong. In the present study, we explored whether this adaptive response after social exclusion is moderated by social anxiety. Eighty-two undergraduate participants completed self-report measures including the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) and a recall task for social exclusion/acceptance manipulation. Thereafter, we assessed emotion recognition bias through a computer-based experiment, asking the participants to search for a target expression (happy, angry) in a crowd of faces. By applying signal detection theory, we examined sensitivity (d’) and response criterion (c) for each expression. We found that there was no difference in emotion recognition for each expression across exclusion and acceptance, not considering social anxiety. However, the moderating effect of social anxiety was found in c, not in d’. In terms of c for the angry expression, those with lower social anxiety tended to judge an angry face as “absent” after exclusion, more than after acceptance. On the other hand, those with higher social anxiety did not judge differently after exclusion/acceptance. These results indicate that individuals with lower social anxiety cope with exclusion through adaptive emotion recognition, whereas those with higher social anxiety do not.
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