Attentional biases are widely researched with avoidance of negative facial expressions being frequently reported. There is, however, still a limited amount of research focusing on attentional biases regarding individuals whom we had an already established connection with. We aimed to find out, how social exclusion or neutral interaction with individuals affects our ability to recognize different emotions on their faces.
Participants (N=95) first completed a visual search task searching for various emotional expressions (happy, angry, fearful, or disgusted) among neutral faces. Then, they played a game of Cyberball with two pre-programmed players, in three different conditions: (1) Control – the players made the same number of throws to the participant and each other, (2) Bully – the participant was asked not to throw to one of the players ("excluded”), or (3) Victim – one („hostile”) player did not throw to the participant. After this, participants completed the same visual search task, where the faces of the players in the Cyberball game also appeared both as targets and distractors.
In the Bully condition the excluded players’ disgusted expression was found significantly slower, than disgusted expressions of unknown individuals when the excluded player appeared as a distractor or was not present at all. Similarly, in the Victim condition, the reaction time for finding the neutral players’ disgusted expression was the slowest compared to finding the unknown individuals’ expression. Our findings support that negative social interactions lead to avoidance of the affected person’s negative expressions, as well as that of bystanders'.