It was known that the observation of social exclusion has a similar influence to the experience of social exclusion. The pain related to exclusions is the trigger motivation to recovery of the need to belong, i.e., to seek social connection with others. The purpose of this study was to explore individuals' preference for social connection after observance of exclusion by focusing on social signs (both emotion and race, e.g., smiling outgroup member vs. angry ingroup member) to clarify the dominance of social signs.
Participants (74 Japanese undergraduate and graduate students, including 49 females) first observed a scene where one of the players is excluded or accepted by incorporating the Cyberball game (Williams et al., 2000) simulated on a computer. At this time, the players' categories were manipulated by attaching a Japanese or a foreign name to each player. Subsequently, in the task of facial recognition, each facial stimulation with manipulated feeling (angry, neutral, smiling face) and racial category (the proportion of the Black face morphed with the Japanese face; 0, 25, 50, 75, 100％) was presented on the display for 350ms, respectively. Participants were then requested to evaluate their willingness to work on a task with the presented target.
The results showed that emotions yielded a greater effect size than racial categories as a cue for acceptance. Furthermore, participants under the observing exclusion unexpectedly had a lower desire for social connection with a smiling Japanese face than under the observing acceptance. In this study, feeling is indicated to be a dominant acceptance sign. However, Steele et al. (2018) is one of them, indicating the significant influence of category over feeling. Future tasks will include clarification of the processing mechanism in more detail.