The Effect of Reappraising Social Exclusion on Emotional Distress

The purpose of this investigation was to examine whether reappraisal, which is a strategy where the personal meaning of an event is reevaluated, would influence participants’ emotional reactions to social exclusion feedback. It was expected that reappraising this event would reduce the emotional distress that accompanies social exclusion, but engaging in this strategy would impair subsequent psychological processes associated with social success. The results showed that reappraising the feedback as an invalid threat reduced the emotional distress; however, there was no evidence that the reappraisal strategy impaired subsequent impression management. This work has theoretical implications for research in emotion and social exclusion. INTRODUCTION People have an innate drive to belong (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). When this need is thwarted (e.g., via social exclusion), people experience a variety of negative consequences. For example, people feel worse than if they were not excluded, and they become more motivated to be accepted. In short, threats to belongingness have significant effects on the self. The purpose of this experiment was to examine whether reappraisal, which is a coping strategy in which threats are evaluated as irrelevant to the self, effectively reduces the emotional impact caused by social exclusion. We also investigated whether this strategy impacts subsequent psychological processes associated with interpersonal success (e.g., impression management). The Effects of Social Exclusion Social exclusion has two primary effects relevant to the present study. First, social exclusion causes emotional distress (e.g., Baumeister & Tice, 1990; Gerber & Wheeler, 2009a). To be more precise, researchers find that social exclusion produces more emotional distress than comparison groups, but literal readings of reported levels of distress fall near the midpoints, rather than the extreme negative end (Blackhart, Nelson, Knowles, & Baumeister, 2009). One explanation for these lower levels of distress than would be expected is that social exclusion activates defensive systems that reduce the emotional impact. (DeWall & Baumeister, 2006; MacDonald & Leary, 2005). However, little work has directly investigated the effectiveness and consequences of engaging in emotion regulation following social exclusion. A second relevant effect of social exclusion is that people become particularly motivated to establish social relationships. Maner, DeWall, Baumeister, and Schaller (2007) found that socially excluded participants were more motivated to form social relationships than socially accepted participants. Furthermore, DeWall, Baumeister, and Vohs (2008) showed that socially excluded participants engaged in more self-regulation than socially accepted participants, but this pattern only occurred if they believed that the acts of self-regulation were indicators of social success. Together these findings suggest that social exclusion influences subsequent psychological processes associated with interpersonal success. It is not clear, however, whether reappraising social exclusion feedback as invalid will reduce the motivation to engage in processes associated with social success. Reappraisal Lazarus (1991) asserts that emotions result from the appraisal of events. Reappraisal, however, is a process whereby people re-evaluate an event, sometimes in a way that distances a threat from the self. Thus, Lazarus (1991) asserts that reappraisal “is distinguished from appraisal only by coming later” (p. 134). For example, a person who rides a rollercoaster may appraise the event and then experience fear, but a further evaluation (i.e., reappraisal) of the experience may alter the experience of a subsequent ride on the rollercoaster, such that it is experienced as “thrilling” rather than “scary.” This distinction between appraisal and reappraisal is important because examining the effect of reappraisal (not appraisal) of a social exclusion episode is ecologically valid. It seems less likely that one would anticipate and evaluate future social exclusion feedback than one would react to the event, re-evaluate its meaning, and in turn, alter responses to future episodes of social exclusion. Despite the fact that reappraisal is a response process, some researchers conceptualize reappraisal as an anticipatory strategy (Gross, 2002). While this line of work distinguishes itself in where reappraisal takes place, these studies are important because they find that reappraisal effectively reduces emotional distress and is accompanied by fewer social (Butler et al, 2003) and cognitive (Richards & Gross, 1999; 2000) consequences than other emotion regulation strategies. Reappraising Social Exclusion Research shows that reappraisal is both an effective and an efficient strategy in the context of films (Gross, 1998) and slides (Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002) that elicit negative emotion, but few paradigms have examined this strategy in the context of personally threatening events (see Richards, Butler, & Gross, 2003 for an exception). This is important because unique challenges arise in reappraising social exclusion. First, social exclusion reduces the motivation to engage in self-regulation. Researchers found that in the absence of monetary reward and stimulated self-awareness (Baumeister, DeWall, Ciarocco & Twenge, 2005) or the belief that the self-regulation task is associated with developing social relationships (DeWall et al., 2008), socially excluded individuals were less likely to engage in self-regulation than comparison groups. Therefore, socially excluded people may be unmotivated to regulate their emotional response by reappraising the event. Second, social exclusion may impair cognitive processes required for reappraisal. To be sure, Ochsner et al. (2002) found that reappraisal is associated with areas of the prefrontal cortex involved in working memory, and Baumeister, Twenge, and Nuss (2002) demonstrated that social exclusion impairs reasoning abilities. Taken together, it may be that cognitive processes required to reappraise social exclusion are impaired by the event. The third challenge to reappraising social exclusion arises from the consequences of engaging in emotion regulation itself. If individuals effectively reappraise a social exclusion episode, the energy needed to engage in other forms of self-regulation required for establishing and maintaining social relationships may be impaired. The capacity or resources allocated to regulate numerous psychological processes are limited (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000). Therefore, allocating regulatory resources to manage one aspect of the self (e.g., emotion distress) impairs the management of other aspects of the self (e.g., impression management). To be sure, Vohs, Baumeister, and Ciarocco (2005) demonstrated that individuals who regulated their expressive behavior to an emotional film scored lower on a measure of impression management than individuals who did not regulate their expressive behavior. There is some indirect evidence, however, suggesting that reappraisal will effectively and efficiently reduce the emotional impact of social rejection. Zhou, Vohs, and Baumeister (2009) showed that socially excluded participants were less likely to experience distress if they had resources that signified future social success. That is, the belief that this threat was irrelevant to future situations of social acceptance altered their emotional response to the event. Also, reappraisal is a less depleting strategy than other emotion regulation strategies (Vohs & Schmeichel, 2003). Therefore, it may be accompanied with fewer costs to subsequent impression management, which requires self-regulation. The Present Study The need to belong is a fundamental drive, and threats to this need are typically associated with emotional distress and a desire to improve social success. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to determine (a) whether reappraisal would reduce the emotional impact of social exclusion and (b) whether this would impair subsequent impression management. This is important because social exclusion presents unique challenges to using reappraisal not yet fully examined in previous work. To examine these questions, participants engaged in a first-impression interview conducted by a confederate and then received exclusion feedback. Following this threatening feedback, participants were randomly assigned to reappraise the event by either writing why they believe the feedback is a valid threat or an invalid threat or were assigned to a control condition, where they wrote about a typical day. To determine how the reappraisal of the event would affect subsequent responses to the event, participants engaged in another first-impression interview and subsequent social exclusion feedback. We predicted that participants would experience significantly less emotional distress after reappraising the interview as an invalid way to assess their friendship potential than after reappraising the event as valid way to assess their friendship potential or not evaluating the event. We also expected that participants who reappraised the feedback would score lower on a measure of impression management than participants in the control condition.