Adaptive Responses to Social Exclusion

PS YC HOLOGICA L SC IENCE

Short Report

Adaptive Responses to Social Exclusion Social Rejection Improves Detection of Real and Fake Smiles Michael J. Bernstein, Steven G. Young, Christina M. Brown, Donald F. Sacco, and Heather M. Claypool

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Miami University

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Being excluded from social relationships poses numerous immediate and long-term threats (e.g., Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Consequently, it is not surprising that people are sensitive to cues that indicate potential rejection (Pickett & Gardner, 2005). For example, individuals who are dispositionally high in need to belong are better than others at identifying facial expressions and vocal tones (Pickett, Gardner, & Knowles, 2004), and ostracized participants have better memory for socially relevant information than do nonostracized participants (Gardner, Pickett, & Brewer, 2000). In both cases, individuals either fearing rejection or suffering actual rejection show increased attention to social cues. Facial expressions of emotion can act as such social cues. A Duchenne smile, for example, involves the automatic activation of two facial muscles in response to the experience of pleasure and is generally considered a ‘‘true’’ smile (Ekman, Davidson, & Friesen, 1990), indicative of cooperation and affiliation (Brown & Moore, 2002). In contrast, non-Duchenne, or ‘‘masking,’’ smiles can conceal the experience of negative emotions (Ekman, Friesen, & O’Sullivan, 1988). Knowing whether a facial expression is conveying an honest affiliation signal should help rejected individuals identify targets who are likely to offer the greatest opportunity for reconnection. Although research has shown that individuals with greater belongingness needs (Pickett et al., 2004) are more accurate at discriminating among true, diagnostic facial-expression signals (e.g., discriminating between expressions of anger and happiness), no research has examined the extent to which rejected individuals are able to determine whether the expression being identified is genuine in the first place. Although being able to identify the qualitative emotional category of a facial display is of value to socially excluded individuals, distinguishing real from fake emotions seems especially important to ensure that

Address correspondence to Michael J. Bernstein, Department of Psychology, Psychology Building, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, e-mail: [email protected].

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reaffiliation efforts are maximally distributed toward people displaying genuine affiliative cues. Indeed, directing resources toward an individual faking an affiliative display would likely be a costly error for socially rejected individuals, who already find themselves in a perilous situation. Accordingly, we hypothesized that rejected individuals would show an enhanced ability to discriminate between real and fake smiles, presumably because they are more attuned than others to subtle social cues, including those present in Duchenne smiles (involuntary signals of cooperation) as opposed to non-Duchenne smiles (controllable and unreliable indicators of cooperation). METHOD

Participants were randomly assigned to social-inclusion, socialexclusion, or control conditions. They were then shown faces exhibiting Duchenne or non-Duchenne smiles and were asked to decide whether each was ‘‘real’’ or ‘‘fake.’’ Participants Thirty-two undergraduates (17 females, 15 males) participated in the study for course credit. Materials The facial stimuli were located on the BBC Science & Nature Web site (BBC, n.d.).1 Respondents were asked to watch 20 color videos (approximately 4 s each) one at a time. Each depicted an individual who had an initially neutral expression and then smiled before returning to a neutral expression. Which faces exhibited real/fake smiles remained constant for all participants. Thus, there were 20 faces, 10 of which were always 1 The faces were pretested for equivalency of attractiveness and positivity. Ratings of neutral expressions of targets showing Duchenne smiles versus neutral expressions of targets showing non-Duchenne smiles revealed no differences (p > .2).

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exhibiting real and 10 of which were always exhibiting fake. Thirteen men and seven women were depicted in the videos.2

Procedure Participants were informed that they were to perform two ostensibly unrelated tasks concerning memory and face perception. The first was an essay task that constituted the manipulation of social status. Participants, having been randomly assigned, wrote about a time they felt ‘‘rejected or excluded,’’ a time they felt ‘‘accepted or included,’’ or their morning the day before the study (control condition). This manipulation has been used previously with success (e.g., Gardner et al., 2000). As a manipulation check, participants responded to a scale assessing the degree to which they felt a threat to their sense of belonging, a common measure used to confirm the effectiveness of rejection manipulations (Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000). Finally, participants watched each video and indicated, on a response sheet next to the computer, whether the smile was ‘‘genuine’’ or ‘‘fake.’’ Upon completion of this task, participants responded to demographic questions before being probed for suspicion, thanked, and debriefed. RESULTS


Manipulation Check To examine whether the manipulation of social rejection was successful, we conducted a one-way between-subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the belongingness measure. Results indicated that the manipulation had the intended effects (prep > .99); rejected participants experienced a greater threat to their sense of belonging.

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Discrimination Scores We calculated d 0 , a signal detection measure examining the ability to discriminate stimuli—in this case, the ability to discriminate Duchenne smiles from non-Duchenne smiles. This measure simultaneously considers hits (correctly identifying a Duchenne smile as genuine) and false alarms (incorrectly identifying a non-Duchenne smile as genuine) in the calculation. The one-way ANOVA on these scores was significant, F(2, 29) 5 5.63, prep 5 .97; compared with control participants (M 5 1.05, SD 5 0.56) and included participants (M 5 1.34, SD 5 0.56), rejected participants (M 5 1.88, SD 5 0.62) exhibited greater discriminability, t(29) 5 3.33, prep 5 .98, d 5 1.35, and t(29) 5 2.12, prep 5.92, d 5 0.87, respectively. Discrimination ability did not differ between included and control participants (p > .25) (see Fig. 1). There was no effect of target or participant sex. Thus, these variables are not discussed further. 2

The stimuli included three minority-group individuals. Removing data for these targets from analyses did not change any findings.

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Sensitivity (d')

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2.1 1.9 1.7 1.5 1.3 1.1 0.9 0.7 0.5

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Inclusion Social Status

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Fig. 1. Mean ability to discriminate (sensitivity, d 0 ) Duchenne and nonDuchenne smiles as a function of social-status condition. Error bars indicate standard errors.

DISCUSSION

We found that socially rejected individuals have enhanced ability to determine whether the ‘‘happy’’ facial expression of a target individual is genuine (a true indication of an affiliative opportunity) or deceptive (feigning the appearance of positive affect). This suggests that motivation to reaffiliate increases rejected individuals’ sensitivity to other social cues indicating belongingness opportunities—specifically, facial displays that are honest signals of cooperation and affiliation. Although the results of the current study are congruent with some of the rejection literature showing reaffiliative responses to social exclusion (Lakin & Chartrand, 2005; Maner, DeWall, Baumeister, & Schaller, 2007), these results are among the first to show that rejection can lead to increases in performance at a perceptual level, provided that the performance supports opportunities for affiliation. Once rejected, people are left with a strong desire to be accepted, which leads them toward interaction partners with whom they might affiliate. Therefore, it seems essential to detect legitimate signs of positivity that indicate possible reaffiliation with other people. Otherwise, rejected individuals could miss out on new chances for acceptance or ‘‘waste’’ affiliation efforts on people who are not receptive. Future research should examine whether other faked emotions can be differentiated from true emotions, as well as how these perceptual skills may guide subsequent behavioral choices. REFERENCES Baumeister, R.F., & Leary, M.R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497–529. BBC. (n.d.) Spot the fake smile. Retrieved October 1st, 2007 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles Brown, W.M., & Moore, C. (2002). Smile asymmetries and reputation as reliable indicators of likelihood to cooperate: An evolutionary analysis. In S.P. Shohov (Ed.), Advances in psychology research (Vol. 11, pp. 59–78). Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers. Ekman, P., Davidson, R.J., & Friesen, W.V. (1990). The Duchenne smile: Emotional expression and brain physiology II. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 342–353.


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Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V., & O’Sullivan, M. (1988). Smiles when lying. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 414–420. Gardner, W.L., Pickett, C.L., & Brewer, M.B. (2000). Social exclusion and selective memory: How the need to belong influences memory for social events. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 486–496. Lakin, J.L., & Chartrand, T.L. (2005). Exclusion and nonconscious behavioral mimicry. In K.D. Williams, J.P. Forgas, & W. von Hippel (Eds.), The social outcast: Ostracism, social exclusion, rejection, and bullying (pp. 279–296). New York: Psychology Press. Maner, J.K., DeWall, C.N., Baumeister, R.F., & Schaller, M. (2007). Does social exclusion motivate interpersonal reconnection? Resolving the ‘‘porcupine problem.’’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 42–55.

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Pickett, C.L., & Gardner, W.L. (2005). The social monitoring system: Enhanced sensitivity to social cues and information as an adaptive response to social exclusion and belonging need. In K.D. Williams, J.P. Forgas, & W. von Hippel (Eds.), The social outcast: Ostracism, social exclusion, rejection, and bullying (pp. 213–226). New York: Psychology Press. Pickett, C.L., Gardner, W.L., & Knowles, M. (2004). Getting a cue: The need to belong and enhanced sensitivity to social cues. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1095–1107. Williams, K.D., Cheung, C.K.T., & Choi, W. (2000). Cyberostracism: Effects of being ignored over the Internet. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 748–762.

(RECEIVED 1/18/08; REVISION ACCEPTED 4/12/08)

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