The Impact of Racial Group Status on Neural Activity, Belongingness, and Distress during Social Exclusion

Social exclusion, whereby individuals are made to feel isolated by others, has been frequently demonstrated to be detrimental to human social needs and can negatively impact mental and physical health because human beings are intrinsically social (Goodwin et al., 2010). Past research has shown that human motivational, psychological, and affective responses to ostracism indicate increased levels of social pain, the emotional pain we experience when our social needs are violated (Kawamoto et. al, 2013). The current study aimed to assess the impact of social exclusion on neural activity, feelings of belonging, and self-reported distress, while also determining whether these responses would be moderated by ingroup/outgroup racial status. Results revealed that manipulation of racial ingroup vs. outgroup status was not associated with differences in P3 amplitude during social exclusion, contrary to previous research. However, self-reported levels of distress were greater after exclusion by the ingroup compared to the outgroup and were predicted by feelings of belonging and social anxiety. RUNNING HEAD: SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND RACE 3 The Impact of Racial Group Status on Neural Activity, Belongingness, and Distress during Social Exclusion The desire to belong is a fundamental part of who we are as human beings, reinforcing our innate biological drive for social interaction, likely fueled by an evolutionary impetus to build and sustain relationships in an effort to survive and reproduce (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Research has suggested that, due to the intrinsic social nature of human beings, social exclusion can undermine human social needs and prove detrimental to mental health (Goodwin, Williams & Carter-Sowell, 2010). Social exclusion, in this sense, can be defined as an act of discrimination that induces feelings of isolation and unimportance in an individual (Kawamoto, Nittono & Ura, 2013). Thus, it can be said that the value of person-to-person interaction remains critically indispensable to us and a lack of it confers negative emotional and psychological effects. To that end, it has also been suggested that one prominent result of being excluded is the onset of social pain, the emotional pain experienced during exclusionary situations. Goodwin and colleagues (2010) suggest that, in violating social needs, the aversive experience of social exclusion impinges on one’s self-worth and leads to “an overt, immediate, and robustly painful yet minimally moderated response” (Goodwin et al., 2010, p. 612). Social pain involves a violation of social needs and is akin to actual pain. In fact, some of the same areas of the brain that are active during the experience of physical pain are active during the experience of social pain as well (Eisenberger, Lieberman & Williams, 2003). Neuroimaging techniques have shown that exclusion causes increased activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus (dACC), responsible for the intense emotional unpleasantness accompanying pain (Nishiyama et al., 2015). Furthermore, there is a correlation between activity in this area of the brain and relative RUNNING HEAD: SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND RACE 4 amounts of self-reported distress (Sleegers, Proulx & van Beest, 2017). Additionally, studies of individuals suffering from chronic pain have found that hurt feelings augment the physical pain experienced (MacDonald & Leary, 2005). This is all evidence that points to a shared overlap between the neural systems involved in social pain and physical pain. Specifically, these findings support the theory of social-physical pain overlap, based on the idea that “humans evolved to become more social and adapted physiological systems to monitor responses to social cues” (Sleegers et al., 2017). Altogether, this suggests that physical and emotional pain systems can be thought of as deeply intertwined. Social exclusion, and reactionary social pain by extension, has also been shown to be moderated by ingroup-outgroup status to an extent. By nature, people are wired to affiliate and align themselves with others who are similar to them in some way, but also maintain a tendency to stray away from those who are not (Brewer, 1991). An ingroup refers to a social grouping that an individual identifies as being a part of on a psychological level (due to some perceived degree of similarity or likeness when compared with oneself), while an outgroup is one in which the opposite reigns true. Social categorization has been shown to lead to biased perceptions of one’s outgroup. According to Brewer’s Optimal Distinctiveness Theory (1991), one has a proclivity to naturally favor their own ingroup above the outgroup. In essence, solidarity is fostered by attachment to others similar to oneself. Thus, by nature of this, a default and subconscious bias towards the outgroup can surface and stem from simply liking and affiliating with one’s own ingroup. However, this attachment to the ingroup gives rise to a new obstacle for members: while social inclusion leads to positive outcomes for individuals (due to increased levels of perceived similarity), social exclusion tends to hurt more coming from ingroup members than when it comes from outgroup members (Sacco, Bernstein, Young & Hugenberg, 2014). Indeed, RUNNING HEAD: SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND RACE 5 “ostracism by ingroup members may be interpreted as evidence of dissimilarity between the self and group, which may sharpen the negative experience of social exclusion” (Sacco et al., 2014, p. 131). If exclusion occurs within the ingroup, this may result in contracted degrees of perceived belongingness to the ingroup and greater interpersonal distress. Regardless of the source of the ostracism, however, it would appear that the pain of being stigmatized is lessened by the solidarity conferred by identifying with others who are cast out (Schmitt, Spears & Branscombe, 2002). Thus, a collective sense of identity is forged from perceived exclusion of the individual, giving one a place among others in the same position. And as a result, a resilience is fostered. In this regard, the formation of a new ingroup takes place to diminish the weight of the psychological/emotional blow inflicted by the ostracism itself. The aim of the current study was to extend previous lines of research by examining how social exclusion by ingroup and outgroup members affects neural and emotional responses. To accomplish this, we recruited 29 participants (16 African-American and 13 Caucasian) who engaged in a social exclusion computer task while their brain responses were monitored. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to record brain activity, as it serves as an ideal, noninvasive measure of electrophysiological activity that allows for a rather acute temporal track of authentic and timely cognitive processes affiliated with social behavior, such as responses to perceived exclusion. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are depictions of brain activity determined after averaging over multiple presentations of stimuli. In this sense, they are thought to be representative of cognitive processes that occur in action. Previous research looking at ERP fluctuation in response to ostracism demonstrated that relative levels of distress caused by social exclusion were correlated with frontal slow wave activity (580-900 ms post-stimulus) and the activity became more positive in subjects experiencing less distress and more negative in those RUNNING HEAD: SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND RACE 6 contending with greater distress (Crowley et al., 2009). Further, a separate study concluded that exclusion was tightly associated with the amplitude of a specific, positive ERP component, the P3 (300-800 ms post-stimulus). In using a computer-based social exclusion task, this group of researchers was able to segment and define the functionality of P3 activity in the context of exclusion. It was found that P3a activity (in more frontal/anterior regions of the brain) is linked to the affective processing of exclusion, while P3b amplitude (in the parietal lobe) is related to its perceived intensity. This is consistent with similar research studies that have revealed strong, positive correlations of subjective social pain (and increased negative affect) with heightened P3b amplitude—this is expressed as higher attentional salience in response to exclusionary cues (Kawamoto et al., 2013) Taken together, these results suggest a regional, time-sensitive allocation of brain resources in response to perceived exclusion and subsequent shifts in social behavior. By means of this study, we aim to gain more concrete answers to our core scientific questions: 1) How does the impact of social exclusion affect neural activity? 2) Is this impact moderated by ingroup/outgroup status, particularly in the context of race? 3) Does ingroup/outgroup status affect individuals’ level of belongingness and negative emotional responses following exclusion? Based on previous work, we hypothesized that: 1) Social pain, evoked by social exclusion, will lead to increased P3 activity typically correlated with negative mood, and heightened attentional allocation to exclusionary cues (Weschke & Niedeggen, 2015). RUNNING HEAD: SOCIAL EXCLUSION AND RACE 7 2) Social exclusion will yield different neural processing when it comes from a racial ingroup/outgroup member, possibly pointing to different innate sensitivities/responses to social pain. 3) Social exclusion will yield different levels of social belongingness and distress based on whether they are rejected by ingroup compared to outgroup members. More specifically, we anticipate that neural processing of exclusion and self-reported feelings of distress will be larger and that feelings of social belongingness would be lower in response to ingroup exclusion than outgroup exclusion, falling in line with previous research. To test these hypotheses, we used an exclusionary research paradigm known as “Cyberball”. In this program, participants are