Social exclusion and pain sensitivity: Why exclusion sometimes hurts and sometimes numbs

Some research indicates that social exclusion leads to increased emotional- and physical-pain sensitivity,whereas other work indicates that exclusion causes emotional- and physical-pain numbing. this research sought to examine what causes these opposing outcomes. in study 1,the paradigm used to instantiate social exclusion was found to moderate the social exclusion-physical pain relation: future-life exclusion led to a numbing of physical pain whereas cyberball exclusion led to hypersensitivity. study 2 examined the underlying mechanism,which was hypothesized to be the severity of the social injury. participants were subjected to either the standard future-life exclusion manipulation (purported to be a highly severe social injury) or a newly created,less-severe version. supporting our hypothesis,the standard (highly severe) future-life exclusion led to physical-pain numbing,whereas the less-severe future-life exclusion resulted in hypersensitivity. implications of these results for understanding the exclusion-pain relation and other exclusion effects are discussed. © 2012 society for personality and social psychology,inc.