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Comfortably Numb? Nonverbal Reactions to Social Exclusion

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Abstract

This study examined people’s nonverbal reactions to being excluded during a social interaction. According to the ‘numbness hypothesis’, individuals who are being excluded may not display overt signs of distress but may lack in emotion and appear lethargic or numb instead. Nevertheless, the validity of this hypothesis has recently been questioned. In the present study, we hypothesized that the nonverbal behaviors of individuals who are being excluded are likely to be indicative of sadness and social withdrawal rather than numbness per se. For this purpose, participants were excluded or included during an interaction with two confederates. Automatic detection of facial expressions indicated that, although participants did display a more neutral face when they were excluded compared to when they were included, they also expressed more sadness and less joy. In addition, manual coding of nonverbal behaviors indicated that individuals who were excluded displayed fewer affiliative behaviors. These findings are not compatible with the numbness hypothesis. Individuals who are being excluded do display emotions (i.e., more sadness, less joy), be it that these emotions are typically associated with decreased energy levels and social disengagement.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, we use the term ‘exclusion’. This term is meant to be synonymous to the term ‘ostracism’, which is generally defined as being ignored or excluded (e.g., Williams 2001).

  2. This study was part of a larger research project and so we incorporated other measures as well. For example, we measured various trait level variables (e.g., need to belong, fear of negative evaluation, self-esteem, trust, perceptiveness, responsiveness) and we also measured participants’ heart rate. For this latter purpose, six electrodes were applied to participants’ chests after the global procedure was explained. The heart rate measures did not yield a clear pattern of results, however, which is probably due to important confounds. For example, we found that excluded participants had lower heart rates (reflected in an increase in LVET scores) during the experimental manipulation compared to before whereas no such difference was found for participants in the inclusion condition. We suspect that this difference is the result of the required needs of the task (i.e., participants in the exclusion condition no longer talked and moved whereas participants in the inclusion condition were still actively involved in the interaction) rather than a psychological change brought by the exclusion experience (see also Mendes 2009). Further information about these data and further analyses are available from the authors upon request.

  3. Given that the study was part of a larger research project, the post experiment questionnaire also included a scale that assessed aggressive and prosocial behavioral intentions toward the confederates and that assessed participants’ attachment styles.

  4. Because estimates for several emotions (sad, joy, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust) were skewed, we conducted an additional set of analyses with square-root transformed data that normalized the distribution. These analyses yielded a similar pattern of results and all findings persisted.

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Acknowledgments

We express our gratitude to Bregje Rijbroek, Rian Blankenstein, Marjolein de Vries, and Charlotte Oostrom for their help in collecting the data for this study. We are also grateful to Eric Postma for his help in analyzing the data with the Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication and Information Sciences, Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC), Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Juliette Schaafsma, Emiel Krahmer, Marie Postma, Marc Swerts, Martijn Balsters & Ad Vingerhoets

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  1. Juliette Schaafsma
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  2. Emiel Krahmer
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  3. Marie Postma
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  4. Marc Swerts
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Correspondence to Juliette Schaafsma.

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Schaafsma, J., Krahmer, E., Postma, M. et al. Comfortably Numb? Nonverbal Reactions to Social Exclusion. J Nonverbal Behav 39, 25–39 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0198-9

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