Does Level of Social Support During Rejection Affect Pain Sensitivity and Distress?

This study investigated whether level of social support would decrease emotional distress and physical pain sensitivity following rejection. Healthy undergraduate students received varying levels of social support from a close companion during the Partial Future Life Alone rejection paradigm. Participants also completed baseline and post-stressor measures of physical pain sensitivity as well as post-stressor measures of emotional distress.

Psychological and neuroendocrine reactivity to ostracism.

This study used the ostracism detection theory to investigate how ostracism impacts individuals in two ways: (1) immediate poststressor needs, mood, ruminative thoughts, and desire to affiliate, and (2) short-term affective and cortisol reactivity. A total of 58 college students were randomly assigned to the inclusion or ostracism conditions of Cyberball, a virtual ball-tossing game. Immediately following the experimental manipulation, ostracized participants reported more thwarted psychological need states, more negative mood, and fewer positive ruminative thoughts, relative to their included counterparts.

Biopsychosocial responses to social rejection in targets of relational aggression.

A total of 28 college students participated in a live interpersonal challenge to assess psychosocial and neuroendocrine stress responses to social exclusion in females. Using the tend-and-befriend theory as a model for interpersonal stress response, this study examined how social exclusion is related to social information processing, willingness to affiliate, psychological state affect, and cortisol reactivity in women with a history of relational victimization. Results revealed that cortisol reactivity was associated with better social information processing among women who reported the least relational victimization.