The Effect Of Social Exclusion On Gaze Cueing Effect

Eye fixation direction plays an important role in spatial cues.In social interactions,we usually automatically follow the observer’s eye fixation position for attention transfer.In the lab,researchers have found that we process objects more quickly when they are in the direction of the gaze cues than when they are in the opposite direction.This phenomenon is called the Gaze Cueing Effect（GCE）.The present study found that the relationship between the observer and the cued face is an important factor affecting the effect of gaze cuing.As a kind of negative emotional experience in interpersonal communication,social rejection is considered to be able to regulate the effect of gaze cues.However,the present study only examined the effect of social rejection on the processing of strangers’ gaze cues,and the corresponding research results mainly reflected the effect of social rejection on social cognitive processing.Social exclusion is the interpersonal interaction between two or more individuals.However,there is no research on whether social exclusion has different effects on the processing of gaze cues between the excluded and the non-excluded.The study of this problem is helpful for us to better understand how the perception of higher social relationships affects the processing of social spatial cues.In view of this,a two-stage task was adopted in this study.Cyberball task was completed in the first stage,and social rejection and acceptance emotional experience were induced by the number of times the subjects caught the ball in the Cyberball game.Social rejection was in the case of less catching the ball,and social acceptance was in the case of more catching the ball.In the second stage,participants completed the classic gaze cue task,in which the faces with eyes looking left or right were used as cue information,and the task was to judge where the target appeared after the cue face.In the second stage,the faces that had cooperated with the subjects in Cyberball game in the first stage and 2 unfamiliar faces（control faces）were used as cue faces.The relationship between cue and target was divided into two conditions: consistent and inconsistent.In experiment 1,89 subjects were randomly assigned to the rejection group or the acceptance group to complete the gaze cue task after the Cyberball task,with response time as the dependent variable.The results showed that: for the exclusion group,the exclusion face and the control face induced the typical gaze cue effect at the SOA200ms;At SOA700 ms,only control faces induced gaze cueing effect,but exclusion faces did not induce gaze cueing effect.For the inclusion group,no matter SOA is 200 ms or SOA is 700 ms,both the inclusion face and the control face have the effect of gaze cue.In addition,it was found that the amount of gaze cueing effect induced by the exclusion group was significantly smaller than that induced by the inclusion group at the SOA700 ms.In experiment 2,on the basis of experiment 1,eye movement technique was used to further explore whether the smaller effect size of gaze cues on the excluded faces was due to the slower orientation under the condition of consistent cue target or the faster dissociation under the condition of inconsistent cue target.Seventy subjects participated in experiment 2.The results showed that the exclusion group did not induce gaze cueing effect,and the size of gaze cueing effect induced by exclusion face was significantly smaller than that induced by acceptance face.The results of eye movement showed that the latency of initial gaze to target location was significantly longer in the face with rejection as the cue than in the face with acceptance as the cue.There was no significant difference in the lantency of the first fixation to the target position between the rejection face and the acceptance face under the condition of incongruent cue target.The results of this study showed that social exclusion affected the processing of the ostracist’s gaze cues,but did not affect the processing of the stranger’s gaze cues.This effect occurred at the later stage of face processing and was mainly due to the fact that individuals were slower to follow the rejector’s eye gaze and shift attention.This study provides experimental evidence that the perception of higher social relationships can affect the processing of social spatial cues from top to bottom.