Correction to: 'How the pandemic affected psychological research'.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsos.241311.

The Pursuit of Approval: Social Media Users' Decreased Posting Latency Following Online Exclusion as a Form of Acknowledgment-Seeking Behavior.

How do individuals behave after the sting of social exclusion on social media? Previous theorizing predicts that, after experiencing exclusion, individuals either engage in activities that reconnect them with others, or, they withdraw from the context. We analyzed data from Twitter ( = 47,399 posts; = 2,000 users) and Reddit ( = 58,442 posts; = 2,000 users), using relative (un)popularity of users' own posts (i.e.

How the pandemic affected psychological research.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many journals swiftly changed their editorial policies and peer-review processes to accelerate the provision of knowledge about COVID-related issues to a wide audience. These changes may have favoured speed at the cost of accuracy and methodological rigour. In this study, we compare 100 COVID-related articles published in four major psychological journals between 2020 and 2022 with 100 non-COVID articles from the same journal issues and 100 pre-COVID articles published between 2017 and 2019.

Ostracism Experiences of Sexual Minorities: Investigating Targets' Experiences and Perceptions by Others.

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people face frequent discrimination, maltreatment, and violence for transgressing gender roles upheld in heteronormative societies. Ostracism (i.e.

It will (never) stop hurting: Do repeated or chronic experiences of exclusion lead to hyper- or hyposensitive psychological responses?

Unlike one-time lab manipulations of exclusion, in real life, many people experience exclusion, from others and from groups, over extended periods, raising the question of whether individuals could, over time, develop hypo- or hypersensitive responses to chronic exclusion. In Study 1, we subjected participants to repeated experiences of inclusion or exclusion (three Cyberball games, time lag of three days, = 194; 659 observations). We find that repeatedly excluded individuals become hypersensitive to inclusion, but not to exclusion.

When and why we ostracize others: Motivated social exclusion in group contexts.

Research on ostracism has mostly focused on ostracized targets' reactions to being excluded and ignored. In contrast, the ostracizing sources' perspective and reasons for why individuals decide to ostracize others are still a largely unexplored frontier for empirical research. We propose two fundamental motives situated in the target's behavior that drive motivated ostracism decisions for the benefit of one's group: A perceived norm violation of the target and perceived expendability of the target for achieving group goals.

Social pain by non-social agents: Exclusion hurts and provokes punishment even if the excluding source is a computer.

Prior research has shown that being excluded by computer-agents in experimental exclusion paradigms threatens individuals' basic needs to a similar extent as being excluded by humans. It is less clear, however, why this similarity between computer and human exclusion occurs, and whether it applies only to reactions immediately after the exclusion event (reflexive stage), or also to reactions that occur further downstream (e.g.

Call me maybe: Risk factors of impaired social contact during the COVID-19 pandemic and associations with well-being.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused major societal changes worldwide, with the most notable being lockdowns and restrictions on social contact. We conducted a longitudinal study (total n = 1907) in Germany with two time points to (1) identify demographic risk factors of impaired social contact during the pandemic, as well as investigate potential consequences of (2) impaired social contact and (3) different modes of communication on individuals' well-being during the first lockdown in spring 2020. Results indicate that particularly individuals living alone and being unable to work reported a lower frequency of (face-to-face) contact in comparison with participants living with others or working.

Depressed and excluded: Do depressive symptoms moderate recovery from ostracism?

Background: Prior studies show that depressed individuals react with more immediate reflexive need threat to ostracism than healthy controls. However, it remains unclear whether the observed difference between depressed individuals and healthy controls is caused by ostracism. To find out, the exclusion condition needs to be compared to a baseline condition: inclusion.

The experience of ostracism over the adult life span.

Ostracism, that is, being excluded and ignored by others, is a highly painful and threatening experience for individuals. Most empirical research on ostracism has been carried out in the lab or focused on samples in specific contexts. Here, we investigate the effects of age on how individuals experience ostracism within a broad, representative sample of the adult German population (the Socio-Economic Panel).

Who gets ostracized? A personality perspective on risk and protective factors of ostracism.

Ostracism, excluding and ignoring others, results from a variety of factors. Here, we investigate the effect of personality on the likelihood of becoming a target of ostracism. Theorizing that individuals low in conscientiousness or agreeableness are at risk of getting ostracized, we tested our hypotheses within 5 preregistered studies: Four experiments investigating participants' willingness to ostracize targets characterized by different personality traits and a reverse correlation face modeling study where we determined and subsequently validated the stereotypical face of an ostracized person.

Who's to blame? Dissimilarity as a cue in moral judgments of observed ostracism episodes.

When observing an ostracism episode, observers may wish to know whether ostracism is justified or not. If ostracism appears unjustified, observers will likely blame the sources and sympathize with the target; if it appears justified, observers will likely blame and devalue the target. Here we introduce the "social dissimilarity rule," which holds that observers base their moral judgments on dissimilarities between the members of the observed group.

When Silence Is Not Golden: Why Acknowledgment Matters Even When Being Excluded.

Following ostracism, individuals are highly sensitive to social cues. Here we investigate whether and when minimal acknowledgment can improve need satisfaction following an ostracism experience. In four studies, participants were either ostracized during Cyberball (Studies 1 and 2) or through a novel apartment-application paradigm (Studies 3 and 4).

Knowing One's Place: Parental Educational Background Influences Social Identification with Academia, Test Anxiety, and Satisfaction with Studying at University.

First-generation students (i.e., students whose parents did not attend university) often experience difficulties fitting in with the social environment at universities.

Correction: Under threat by popular vote: German-speaking immigrants' affect and cognitions following the Swiss vote against mass immigration.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Under threat by popular vote: German-speaking immigrants' affect and cognitions following the Swiss vote against mass immigration.

A popular initiative in support of regulating future immigration to Switzerland was accepted by the electorate in 2014. Assuming that the initiative acted as an exclusionary threat for current immigrants of Switzerland, we conducted an online survey among a sample of highly-skilled German-speaking immigrants ("expats"). Participants reported having experienced negative affect following the vote.

When It's Okay That I Don't Play: Social Norms and the Situated Construal of Social Exclusion.

Being excluded and ignored has been shown to threaten fundamental human needs and cause pain. Such reflexive reactions to social exclusion have been conceptualized as direct and unmoderated (temporal need threat model of ostracism). Here, we propose an extension and argue that reflexive reactions depend on how social exclusion situations are construed.