Overt attention to social signals during social exclusion: A pre-registered study

Ostracism refers to a social situation during which one or more individuals are ignored or excluded. William’s “Temporal Need-Threat Model” proposes that ostracism threatens fundamental social needs that individuals spontaneously attempt to secure by seeking reaffiliation. Using the Cyberball Game, a computerized ball-tossing game used to study the psychological responses to ostracism via social inclusion vs. exclusion phases, previous studies showed that attention to social signals was an accurate proxy of the reaffiliation needs, themselves being derived from the social exclusion feelings. Yet, contradictory results challenge this view, either because a subset of studies revealed opposite patterns, or because social attention is thought to escape cognitively controlled attentional processes. Here, we directly investigated the relationship between the participants’ social exclusion feelings and their overt attention patterns towards social signals during a Cyberball game. Contrary to William’s Temporal Need-Threat Model, we found anecdotal evidence supporting a negative relationship between attention to social signals and social exclusion feeling. Exploratory analyses revealed that overt social attention patterns in a situation of social exclusion are more intricate than previously assumed, with gaze proportion toward faces varying throughout the Cyberball game, but most likely independent of participants’ social pain.