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Social exclusion increases the visual working memory capacity of social stimuli

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Abstract

While social exclusion has previously been found to weaken the visual working memory capacity (WMC) of nonsocial stimuli such as colored squares, this study examines the influence of social exclusion on the visual WMC of social stimuli. In Experiment 1 and 2, a Cyber-ball game was used to manipulate social exclusion. Biology motion (BM) in Experiment 1, while in Experiment 2 human faces were used as social stimuli. In Experiment 1, 44 participants were asked to remember 1–5 biology motions. The results demonstrated that socially excluded participants had a larger WMC in BM than the socially included group. In Experiment 2, 54 participants were asked to remember 1–4 human faces showing three different emotions (angry, happy, neutral). The results demonstrated that socially excluded participants had a larger WMC than the control group in all three types of emotional face. The results of experiment 1 and 2 suggest that social exclusion increases the capacity of social stimuli in visual WMC.

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Funding

This work was supported by the grants from the fundamental research funds for the central universities (SWU1809352), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. NSFC71472156 and NSFC31600919), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant no. SWU1509110).

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  1. Xiaoli Du and Mengsi Xu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Southwest University, Tiansheng Road No. 2, Chongqing, 400715, China

    Xiaoli Du, Mengsi Xu, Cody Ding, Shuge Yuan, Lijie Zhang & Dong Yang

  2. Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (Southwest University), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, 400715, China

    Xiaoli Du, Mengsi Xu, Cody Ding, Shuge Yuan, Lijie Zhang & Dong Yang

  3. Department of Educational Psychology, Research, and Evaluation, University of Missouri, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Cody Ding

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Du, X., Xu, M., Ding, C. et al. Social exclusion increases the visual working memory capacity of social stimuli. Curr Psychol 39, 1149–1160 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00274-1

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