Attentional Bias Towards Interpersonal Evaluation Information In Individuals With Different Levels Of Self-Esteem After Social Exclusion

An important function of self-esteem is to help people cope with their own response to the threat. Social exclusion is a kind of self-threat, when people encounter social exclusion, the basic and important sense of belonging was destructed, and self-esteem will affect how people respond to this self-threat. Specifically, high self-esteem person tend to take compensating strategy, having a much more stronger motivation of seeking new social bonds for compensating the damage to the sense of belonging. But low self-esteem person tend to take breaking strategy.having a much more stronger motivation to avoid suffering social exclusion.They may be more alert to the threat information in a timely manner to avoid being hurt again. We could expect that the different coping strategies and motivations of person with different levels of self-esteem after social exclusion should be reflected in downstream cognitive processing to explicit behavior. Empirical studies in this area of research, however, have tended to focus primarily on downstream processes,such as self-evaluation, attribution, perseverance, physiological indicators. Researchers have left relatively unexplored the more basic—and possibly more fundamental—cognitive mechanisms presumed to underlie cognitively downstream processes displayed by individuals with different levels of self-esteem after social exclusion. Attention process provides a basic for adaptive advanced cognition and behavior. Selective attention is considered as the transformation mechanism for social perception into action.Therefore, it is necessary to investigating the different coping strategies used by person with different levels of self-esteem when faced social exclusion.This study attempts to explore whether the different coping motives caused by person with different levies of self-esteem after social exclusion will be showed on the most basic and earlist cognitive process. And that will result in different attentional bias towards interpersonal evaluating information(interpersonal acceptive vs.interpernal rejected information) by person with different levels of self-esteem.In this study,we used emotional faces pictures as interpersonal evaluation information. Specifically, we used happy faces as interpersonal accepted information and anger/disgust faces interpersonal rejected information. Experiment1preliminary explore the attentional bias differences of person with different levles of self-esteem towards interpersonal evaluative information after social exclusion through classic emotional Stroop paradigm. The results show that after the experience of social exclusion, high self-esteem participants have attentional bias towards interpersonal accepted information (happy faces),whereas the low self-esteem participants have attentional bias towards interpersonal rejected information (angry/disgust faces). We adopted another paradigm measuring attentional bias—the improved classic point detection paradigm to measure the attentional bias of participants with different levels of self-esteem again, trying to get reverification of experimental results. At the same time, by adding neutral pictures pairs,this paradigm could investigated the mechanism and attentional compotent of attentional bias through the differences between consistent experimental reaction and neutral experimental reaction or between inconsistent experimental reaction and neutral experimental reaction. Its reasoning logic is that if consistent experimental reaction time is less than the neutral experimental pairs, then the attentional component is speeded detection.If inconsistent experimental reaction time is greater than the neutral experiment, then the attentional component is difficulty to disengage.If consistent experimental reaction time is greater than neutral pairs or inconsistent experimental reaction time is less than neutral pairs,then the attentional component is quick avoidance. The results of experiment2validate the results of the experiment1, and also distinguish the components of attentional bias. Specifically, after social exclusion, high self-esteem individuals have attentional bias towards interpersonal accepted information(happy faces),and moreover, the component of this attentional bias is difficulty to disengage,because the inconsistent experimental reaction time is significantly longer than neutral pairs; low self-esteem individuals have attentional bias towards interpersonal rejected information(angry/disgust faces),and moreover, the component of this attentional bias is quick avoidance, because the inconsistent experimental reaction time is significantly shorter than neutral pairs. And the possible emotion interfering factor brought by the operation of social exclusion is excluded through statistical analysis. The results of this study have some practical significance, for example, low self-esteem individules can take the attention training which could guide them to focus more on positive cues so that they could improve their coping strategy to social exclusion.