INVESTIGATING THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL EXCLUSION ON FACE PROCESSING

Abstract

Because social exclusion leads to adverse effects, excluded individuals exhibit altered social information processing. In particular, these individuals process social information from faces differently than their included counterparts. However, the cognitive mechanisms leading to this difference are unknown. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether or not a decrease in holistic processing, and consequent increase in attention to individual facial features, might characterize some of the observed effects of exclusion on how people process facial information. Adult participants were either excluded or included during a game of Cyberball and then completed the Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Task (VHFPT). Excluded and included individuals did not differ in performance on the VHFPT, suggesting that excluded individuals do not attend to facial features differently than included individuals. Results are discussed in conjunction with previous research and future directions.