Ostracism via virtual chat room-Effects on basic needs, anger and pain

PLoS One. 2017 Sep 6;12(9):e0184215. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184215. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Ostracism is characterized by a social pain provoked by being excluded and ignored. In order to address the effects of social ostracism in virtual non-physical interactions, we developed a more realistic paradigm as an alternative to Cyberball and assessed its effects on participant's expression of basic social needs, emotional experience and painful feeling. The chat room consisted of controlled social dialogue interactions between participants and two other (confederate) chat room partners. Exclusion was manipulated by varying the number of messages a participant received (15% and 33% in exclusion and inclusion, respectively). Analysis of participant (N = 54) responses revealed that exclusion induced a lower experience of basic-need states and greater anger, compared with included participants. In addition, excluded participants reported higher levels of two specific self-pain feelings, namely tortured and hurt. Our findings suggest that this procedure is effective in inducing social ostracism in a realistic and yet highly controlled experimental procedure.

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Anger*
  • Communication
  • Emotions*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Psychological Distance*
  • Social Media*
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

This experiment was supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq – 480891/2012-5). APGD was supported by a scientific initiation grant (FAPESP 2013/24274-2). LMM is supported by a FAPESP PhD Grant (2017/06136-2). OML was supported by a CNPq Post-Doc grant (150249/2017-9). MA was supported by a Post-doc grant (CAPES - 2014). PSB is a CNPq research fellow (304164/2012-7).