Bullying and Sensitivity to Rejection: The Role of Individual Difference Variables in Social Exclusion’s Impact on Eating Behaviors

Social exclusion negatively impacts health behaviors such as eating, and new research suggests that individual difference variables can influence the strength of its effects. Two studies examined whether prior experience with bullying is an individual difference variable that could influence ostracism’s impact on food consumption. I hypothesized that people with a history of bullying would be more likely to eat unhealthy foods than healthy foods after experiencing social exclusion, and that this group would likely consume more food after experiencing social exclusion. Neither study found that prior experience with bullying impacted the strength of ostracism’s effect on food consumption, although Study 2 demonstrated that Rejection Sensitivity plays an important moderating role in participants’ response to social exclusion. BULLYING AND SENSITIVITY TO REJECTION 3 Bullying and Sensitivity to Rejection: The Role of Individual Difference Variables in Social Exclusion’s Impact on Eating Behaviors Considerable research demonstrates the harmful effects of social exclusion. Social exclusion is problematic not only for social relations and self-esteem, but also for health behaviors such as eating (Salvy, Boweker, Nitecki, Kluzynski, Germeroth, & Roemmich, 2011). Past research mainly assumes that negative effects of ostracism are universal, but recent studies have found that individual difference variables can influence the strength of these effects (Romero-Canyas & Downey, 2005; Twenge & Baumeister, 2005; Willams, 1997). What individual difference variables might moderate the effect of ostracism on eating behaviors? A history of being bullied is a likely candidate. To examine this possibility, I will first review research on social exclusion and its negative effects. I will then turn to social exclusion’s relationship with self-regulation and health behaviors, and those individual difference variables that are known to influence the strength of ostracism’s effects. I will next explore the concept of bullying and its harmful impacts. Finally, I will examine how a history of bullying might make a person more susceptible to the effects of ostracism on eating behaviors. Social Exclusion Human beings are social creatures. Throughout history, we have formed groups that have provided us with protection from danger and given us the opportunity to flourish as a species. Thus, group membership has, historically, been crucial to survival. As Williams, Forgas, von Hippel, and Zadro (2005) state: BULLYING AND SENSITIVITY TO REJECTION 4 To be rejected and excluded from the group, and thus from all the benefits of membership, would have been a death sentence—left alone without food, shelter, and vulnerable to outside attack, the life of a social outcast would have been brutal and brief. Hence our survival would have depended on our ability to detect imminent rejection and thereby act—cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally— to regain our membership in the group. (p. 2) Civilization has since evolved, and with it so have the dynamics of daily existence. However, the potential for exclusion or ostracism, defined as the purposeful ignoring and/or excluding by and of individuals or groups, is still present within our society (Williams et al., 2005; Williams, 2007). Many aspects of our daily lives involve the potential for ostracism. We might experience it in the workplace when a colleague fails to respond to a missed call, at home when a loved one is acting brusque, or on the bus when the person we sit next to suddenly changes seats. Ostracism has remained present in our society, as has our “very primitive and automatic adaptive sensitivity to even the slightest hint of social exclusion” (Williams et al., 2005, p. 2). Research on the phenomenon of social exclusion began in the 1960s, though the field is “still in its infancy” (Williams et al., 2005, p. 6). Early studies used physical isolation to understand the effects of exclusion, and later studies shifted their focus from physical isolation to psychological isolation. These later studies used a variety of paradigms to induce exclusion including simply shunning a person, explicit group rejection, or group ignoring of an individual. Current research uses three main paradigms to manipulate inclusion and exclusion. BULLYING AND SENSITIVITY TO REJECTION 5 In the first of these three paradigms, participants take a personality test and are given bogus feedback about their test results that divide them into one of three conditions. In the Future Belonging condition, participants are told that they have a personality type that will allow them to experience numerous healthy relationships throughout their lives. In the Future Alone condition, participants are told that they are the type that will end up living a lonely life devoid of long-term interpersonal relationships. A Misfortune Control is also included, and participants in this condition are told that they will eventually become very accident-prone (Baumeister & Dewall, 2005). The Future Alone condition is what most interests researchers, as this is the condition that induces social exclusion. A second paradigm that manipulates exclusion in current research is a more immediate, current form of exclusion. In this manipulation, participants arrive together and engage in a short, get-to-know-each-other discussion. They are then asked to list which members they would like to work with in a two-person task. Then, each participant is told that he or she will have to work individually for one of two reasons, assigned at random. Half of participants are told that everyone in the group had chosen to work with them, while the other half are told that no one had chosen to work with them. The latter condition is what researchers focus on, as it generates a direct rejection by several other people (Baumeister & Dewall, 2005). A third paradigm, Cyberball, is of particular relevance for the present study. Cyberball is a well-validated paradigm used to research social exclusion (Williams & Jarvis, 2006). It is a five-minute virtual ball-tossing game that induces inclusion or ostracism (Salvy et al., 2011). In this game, participants falsely believe that they are BULLYING AND SENSITIVITY TO REJECTION 6 tossing a ball to two other people; however, these “people” are simply part of the computer program and their behavior is manipulated by the researcher. The program itself shows three figures on the screen, and each figure is associated with a first and last name. One of these figures holds a ball, which is passed between the “players” through clicking. Participants are randomly assigned either to an inclusion control in which the ball is frequently passed to the participant, or to an exclusion condition in which the ball is largely kept from the participant. With these differing paradigms, current research has found that exclusion has immediate and pervasive effects on the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of participants (Williams et al., 2005; Lau, Moulds, & Richardson, 2009). Excluded or rejected people tend to become more aggressive, more self-destructive, less prosocial, and less prone to intelligent thought (Baumeister & Dewall, 2005). Ostracism also has physiological impacts; it has been shown to increase blood pressure and cortisol levels (Twenge & Baumeister, 2005). Of particular relevance to this study are social exclusion’s effects on self-regulation. Social Exclusion and Self-Regulation Self-regulation allows us to override naturally selfish tendencies by modifying our thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors; it helps us adhere to social standards and preserve group acceptance (Baumeister & Dewall, 2005). Because social rejection is often based in people’s objection to one’s behavior, self-regulating by changing disagreeable behaviors would seem a logical thing to do in the face of rejection. Therefore, one might predict that social exclusion would encourage efforts at self-regulation. BULLYING AND SENSITIVITY TO REJECTION 7 In fact, the opposite is true; research indicates that social rejection depletes selfregulatory resources (Salvy et al., 2011; Baumeister & Dewall, 2005). This effect was observed in a study that tested whether socially excluded people would work less at a frustrating task. The ability to persevere is related to self-regulation because it necessitates disregarding the desire to quit working on the discouraging task. This study used the personality feedback exclusion paradigm. After participants received feedback about their futures, they were asked to complete puzzles that had been rigged to be unsolvable. The researchers measured how long participants continued to try to complete the puzzles before giving up. Participants who believed they would have a future without meaningful relationships gave up significantly more quickly than participants in other conditions. This study demonstrates that social exclusion diminishes self-regulation (Baumeister & Dewall, 2005). Another study conducted by Baumeister and Dewall (2005) used the ability to listen as a measure of self-regulation. Attention control is an important self-regulatory process because it involves redirecting attention away from personal thoughts and environmental distractions and toward the person or people with whom we interact. Thus, the ability to pay attention is vital to achieving social acceptance. This study used the same personality exclusion manipulation paradigm. After receiving false feedback, participants were told to sit at a desk and complete a short listening task. In this task, they would hear a woman speaking into the left ear, while in the right ear they would hear a speech about a policy issue. Participants were told to pay attention to the female voice and to ignore the policy speech, and also to write down all words spoken into the left ear that contained the letters “m” or “p.” Those who thought that they would lead lonely lives BULLYING AND