Megan L. Knowles

Getting a Cue: The Need to Belong and Enhanced Sensitivity to Social Cues

To successfully establish and maintain social relationships, individuals need to be sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of others. In the current studies, the authors predicted that individuals who are especially concerned with social connectedness—individuals high in the need to belong—would be particularly attentive to and accurate in decoding social cues. In Study 1, individual differences in the need to belong were found to be positively related to accuracy in identifying vocal tone and facial emotion. Study 2 examined attention to vocal tone and accuracy in a more complex social sensitivity task (an empathic accuracy task). Replicating the results of Study 1, need to belong scores predicted both attention to vocal tone and empathic accuracy. Study 3 provided evidence that the enhanced performance shown by those high in the need to belong is specific to social perception skills rather than to cognitive problem solving more generally.

Rejection Elicits Emotional Reactions but Neither Causes Immediate Distress nor Lowers Self-Esteem: A Meta-Analytic Review of 192 Studies on Social Exclusion:

Competing predictions about the effect of social exclusion were tested by meta-analyzing findings from studies of interpersonal rejection, ostracism, and similar procedures. Rejection appears to cause a significant shift toward a more negative emotional state. Typically, however, the result was an emotionally neutral state marked by low levels of both positive and negative affect. Acceptance caused a slight increase in positive mood and a moderate increase in self-esteem. Self-esteem among rejected persons was no different from neutral controls. These findings are discussed in terms of belongingness motivation, sociometer theory, affective numbing, and self-esteem defenses.

On the Outside Looking In: Loneliness and Social Monitoring

The skill-deficit view of loneliness posits that unskilled social interactions block lonely individuals from social inclusion. The current studies examine loneliness in relation to social attention and perception processes thought to be important for socially skilled behavior. Two studies investigate the association between social monitoring (attention to social information and cues) and self-reported loneliness and number of close social ties. In Study 1, higher levels of loneliness are related to increased rather than decreased incidental social memory. In Study 2, individuals with fewer reported friends show heightened decoding of social cues in faces and voices. Results of these studies suggest that the attentional and perceptual building blocks of socially skilled behavior remain intact, and perhaps enhanced, in lonely individuals. Implications for recent models of belonging regulation and theories of loneliness are discussed.

Motivations for prevention or promotion following social exclusion: being rejected versus being ignored.

Social exclusion evokes powerful motivations and emotions. The present studies examined how these motivations and emotions might differ following exclusion that is explicit, active, and direct (i.e., when one is rejected) versus implicit, passive, and indirect (i.e., when one is ignored). It was hypothesized that being rejected should produce a sense of social loss and lead to more prevention-focused responses, including withdrawal from social contact, thoughts about actions one should not have taken, and increased feelings of agitation. In contrast, being ignored should produce a sense of failure to achieve social gain and lead to more promotion-focused responses, including reengagement in social contact, thoughts about actions one should have taken, and increased feelings of dejection. These hypotheses were supported across 4 studies in which people recalled or underwent experiences of being rejected or ignored. Past research on active versus passive exclusion is reexamined and found to be consistent with these hypotheses as well.

There’s No Substitute for Belonging: Self-Affirmation Following Social and Nonsocial Threats

Feelings of belonging are closely linked to feelings of self-esteem. This article examines whether these feelings are regulated in a similar manner. Research on self-esteem maintenance shows that self-enhancement strategies are interchangeable; self-esteem threats in one domain instigate indirect self-affirmations in unrelated domains that effectively replace needs to directly address the original threats. From this perspective, when self-esteem threats arise from a lack of belonging, indirect self-affirmations should again be both preferred and effective. However, belonging regulation may be distinct from self-esteem regulation. From this belonging maintenance perspective, indirect affirmations that enhance esteem, but do not directly repair belonging, may be relatively less preferred and effective following belonging threats. Supporting the belonging maintenance perspective, four studies demonstrated that whereas intelligence threats tended to elicit indirect self-affirmations, belonging threats elicited relatively more direct self-affirmations. Furthermore, whereas indirect affirmation strategies effectively repaired intelligence threats they did not effectively repair belonging threats.

Increasing Social Engagement Among Lonely Individuals: The Role of Acceptance Cues and Promotion Motivations

Lonely individuals typically fear negative evaluation and engage in overly cautious social behaviors that perpetuate their social isolation. Recent research has found analogous security-oriented (i.e., prevention-focused) responses following experiences highlighting concerns with social loss but differing growth-oriented (i.e., promotion-focused ) responses, such as attempts at social engagement, following experiences highlighting concerns with social gain. The present studies thus investigated whether fostering a promotion focus among lonely individuals through subtle primes of acceptance could reduce their self-protective social avoidance. This hypothesis was supported across four studies in which the links between primed acceptance and promotion-focused motivations were first established, and the impact of such primes on lonely individuals’ social thoughts, intentions, and behaviors were then tested. Implications of observed differences between effects of acceptance primes on lonely versus nonlonely individuals are discussed in terms of deficits versus satiation with feelings of belonging.

Trait Self-esteem Moderates Decreases in Self-control Following Rejection: An Information-processing Account

In the current paper, the authors posit that trait self–esteem moderates the relationship between social rejection and decrements in self–control, propose an information–processing account of trait self–esteems moderating influence and discuss three tests of this theory. The authors measured trait self–esteem, experimentally manipulated social rejection and assessed subsequent self–control in Studies 1 and 2. Additionally, Study 3 framed a self–control task as diagnostic of social skills to examine motivational influences. Together, the results reveal that rejection impairs self–control, but only among low self–esteem individuals. Moreover, this decrement in self–control only emerged when the task had no social implications—suggesting that low self–esteem individuals exert effort on tasks of social value and are otherwise preoccupied with belonging needs when completing nonsocial tasks. Copyright

Social Rejection Biases Estimates of Interpersonal Distance

Given the power of belonging needs to shape individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behavior, we posited that people’s desire for reconnection even influences judgments of physical distance. We hypothesized that rejection motivates individuals to distance themselves from sources of rejection and draw near those who are accepting. We tested this hypothesis in five studies. Participants recalled someone who had rejected or accepted them previously (Study 1), tossed a ball with inclusive and exclusive confederates (Study 2), and relived a past rejection, acceptance, or failure in the presence of an uninvolved other (Studies 3–5). Participants provided retrospective estimates of distance to rejecting and accepting others (Studies 1–2) and to uninvolved others (Studies 3–5). Participants reported that (1) accepting others were closer than rejecting others and (2) uninvolved others were closer than nonsocial targets after rejection but not acceptance or failure. Findings suggest that individuals distort perceptions of distance to serve belonging needs.

Choking Under Social Pressure Social Monitoring Among the Lonely

Lonely individuals may decode social cues well but have difficulty putting such skills to use precisely when they need them—in social situations. In four studies, we examined whether lonely people choke under social pressure by asking participants to complete social sensitivity tasks framed as diagnostic of social skills or nonsocial skills. Across studies, lonely participants performed worse than nonlonely participants on social sensitivity tasks framed as tests of social aptitude, but they performed just as well or better than the nonlonely when the same tasks were framed as tests of academic aptitude. Mediational analyses in Study 3 and misattribution effects in Study 4 indicate that anxiety plays an important role in this choking effect. This research suggests that lonely individuals may not need to acquire social skills to escape loneliness; instead, they must learn to cope with performance anxiety in interpersonal interactions.