Neural and Behavioral Effects of Social Exclusion on Self-Regulation

Researchers investigating the effects of social exclusion on neural activity propose there is a common neural framework underlying self-regulatory processes for both social and cognitive behaviors. This study will shed light on the engagement of these processes across social and cognitive task domains by investigating the effects of social exclusion on cognitive task execution. Neural and behavioral activity were measured while participants completed two flanker task sessions with the Cyberball paradigm occurring in between; additionally, half of the participants experiences exclusion during the Cyberball paradigm. Results showed that, similar to previous research, social exclusion led to impairments in subsequent flanker task performance. Further, there was a relationship between neural activity and task behavior. For excluded participants, neural activity during the first flanker task session was associated with neural activity during Cyberball. These findings diverge from previous studies by suggesting that social exclusion via Cyberball doesn\u27t just impair post-error performance in subsequent task; rather exclusion impacted overall task performance in the current study