Open AccessSocial Exclusion and Disengagement of Covert Attention from Social Signs: The Moderating Role of Fear of Negative Evaluation
Author(s) -
Tanaka Hiroaki,
Ikegami Tomoko
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
japanese psychological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.392
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-5884
pISSN - 0021-5368
DOI - 10.1111/jpr.12197
Subject(s) - covert , disengagement theory , psychology , ambiguity , attentional bias , cognitive psychology , social exclusion , fear of negative evaluation , social inhibition , developmental psychology , cognition , social anxiety , anxiety , computer science , neuroscience , gerontology , medicine , philosophy , linguistics , psychiatry , economics , programming language , economic growth
Previous research has demonstrated that social exclusion motivates individuals with low fear of negative evaluation (FNE) to pay attention to signs of social acceptance, but it does not motivate individuals with high FNE to do so. However, it remains unclear whether this finding reflects overt or covert attentional bias because the researchers employed a dot‐probe task. In order to resolve this ambiguity, the present study solely assessed disengagement of covert attention from social signs after exclusion manipulation in an experiment with university students ( N = 60). As a result, exclusion delayed disengagement of covert attention from facial stimuli regardless of their types of expression for participants with low FNE, but such delay was not observed for participants with high FNE. The result indicated that social exclusion enhances attention to social information in individuals with low FNE, whereas it does not in individuals with high FNE. We discuss the possibility that a decline in inclusionary status affects overt and covert attentional processes differently.