Social exclusion is a painful experience. Recent research has shown, however, that coping with exclusion can be facilitated by favorable conditions. In the current research, we investigated whether construal level affects recovery from social exclusion. We hypothesized that an abstract vs. concrete mindset would moderate coping with exclusion. Indeed, lower compared to higher concrete thinking ...

We examined how individualistic versus collectivistic cultural backgrounds affected the psychological experience of social exclusion. We found that Turkish, Chinese and Indian participants (collectivistic background) differed in their experience of social exclusion from German participants (individualistic background): German participants experienced lower fulfilment of psychological needs in r...

People in Portugal have never been so healthy. Nevertheless, there are great differences in health status between social groups and regions. In 1994, Portugal was the country with the second worst level of inequality in terms of income distribution and with the highest level of poverty in the European Union (EU). Poverty in Portugal affects mainly the elderly and women (especially in single par...

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 ps...

Lack of social support and social exclusion is associated with adverse effects for mental and physical health. Additionally, women appear to be more vulnerable to social triggers of health disturbances. The hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenocortical-axis (HPA axis) might play a key role in this context as it has been shown both to relate to psychosocial conditions and health outcomes and to respond ...

Social exclusion elicits powerful feelings of negative affect associated with rejection. Additionally, experiencing social exclusion reliably recruits neural circuitry associated with emotion processing. Recent work has demonstrated abnormal neural responses to social exclusion in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, it remains unknown to what extent these abn...

Whereas much social psychological research has studied the in-group and out-group implications of social categorization and collective identity ("we"), little research has examined the nature and relevance of collective psychological ownership ("ours") for intergroup relations. We make a case for considering collective psychological ownership as an important source of intergroup tensions. We do...