Social Exclusion And Social Dominance Orientation Influece Empathy

Backgrounds: The negative effects of social exclusion are ubiquitous,and most studies find that social exclusion make someone feel pains,reduces empathy and pro-social behaviors.However,social exclusion could have some positive influences,including increasing the motivation to establish social relations,making more flexible of mental and so on.Rather than being afraid of negative results on the harm of social exclusion,it would be better to focus on the positive outcome.Therefore,this study focuses on the positive effects of social exclusion,which means that we predict that social exclusion may increase empathy.Empathy is not a single dimension psychological phenomenon.The process of empathy includes bottom-up emotional mirroring and top-down cognitive regulation.At the same time,the empathy has a variety of ingredients,including emotional empathy and cognitive empathy.This study explores the effects of social exclusion,as a situational factor,on the different components of empathy.Additionally,the influence of empathy also includes individual differences.Therefore,this study also found the effects of social dominance orientation,as the individual variable,on the different components of empathy.Social dominance orientation also can associate the individual variable and group variable in its own part,which also can observe the influences of the attitudes toward social relationship via individual differences.Methods: Two studies both used the Cyberball paradigm to set the exclusion scenario.In both studies,all participants were randomly assigned to different contexts,requiring subjects to imagine real scenes and as many details as possible.In Experiment 1,we set up three different scenarios,named explicit excluded,implicit excluded and included group.The explicit exclusion is defined by the skipping times of ball of participants is continuous,but the implicit exclusion is random.In Experiment 2,there were 2 sets,implicit excluded and included.And participants were divided into 2 groups by the score of SDO6 scale,one is higher score group and the other is lower score group.The two experiments used different measurements to detect the changes of empathy.In Experiment 1,the participants needed to fill Perspective-taking and empathy-concern subscales from Davis’ s IRI to detect the level of cognitive empathy and emotional empathy.In Experiment 2,participants are required to take an evaluation of sadness pictures and the E-task.Sadness pictures are all from real life and E-task were to write down 6 letters with obvious directions on the white paper attached to the head,such as C and E.Results: In Experiment 1,there are three different social exclusion scenarios: a)explicit exclusion(EE),b)implicit exclusion(IE)and c)included(IC).After the game is completed,participants will fill IRI and SDO6 scale.The results suggest that: 1)the general scores of empathy of excluded participants were significantly higher than that of the accepted participants.Specifically,the scores of the excluded subjects were significantly higher than those of the accepted subjects in perspective-taking subscale.And there were significant differences between the explicit exclusion group and the implicit group,and the difference between the implicit group and the included group was marginal significant.However,there were no significant differences among the three groups in empathy concern subscale.2)The score of empathy in the group of social dominance orientation in higher scores is significantly lower than the group of social dominance orientation of low scores,and the difference was the same in different social exclusion situation.In Experiment 2,there are only two social exclusion groups,which are implicit group and included group.After taking the cyber tossing game,the participants would see some sad pictures and scale the sadness of the picture.Then,the participants were needed to write down some letters with obvious direction on the outside of a whiteboard,which is front of the head or chest of participants.At the last,they filled the SDO6 scale.The results showed that: 1)the depth of sadness of the participants who were excluded was significantly higher than the accepted participants,and the excluded subjects can significantly write more letters with others perspectives,which means that the excluded participants were better in perspective-taking.2)There is no significant difference in the degrees of individual sadness between the groups of social dominance orientation in lower and higher scores;however,there is a significant difference in perspective-taking,which is test by the amount of the letter with obvious directions.Furthermore,the difference of perspective-taking does not change no matter whether the participants were excluded.Conclusion: 1)Individuals usually adopt an egocentric focus to observe the outside,but the ones who had being excluded could shift their perspective-taking,which can improve the individual’s cognitive empathy to understand others better by putting on others’ shoes.2)The empathy-concern do not change by being excluded,however,the empathy of sadness are enhanced strongly by being excluded,which suggested that the change of empathy is about some specific emotion.3)SDO influenced the cognitive and complicated emotions,but do not affect the basic sadness.