Socially Rejected Individuals

Humans have an innate need to assimilate into society. An individual’s desire for things, such survival and reproduction, creates a motivation for social acceptance. This universal motive leads to the formations of relationships, groups, clubs, and communities. However, one of the consequences of social living is that an individual may sometimes feel like she or he has been socially excluded. When an individual feels socially rejected, it affects how he or she perceives others and one’s self. For example, socially rejected participants who read and recalled journal entries about the self, exhibited poorer memory for social events (Hess & Pickett, 2010). The researchers concluded that individuals withdraw from the self after experiencing social rejection.

These findings align with past research, which revealed that socially rejected individuals—in comparison to non-socially rejected individuals—were more adept at deciphering social cues, such as facial expression and vocal tone (Pickett et al., 2004). Furthermore, socially rejected individuals were more accurate in discerning fake from real smiles than individuals who were socially accepted or in the neutral condition (Bernstein, et al., 2008). Together, these experiments suggest socially rejected individuals experience a heightened awareness for social information.

Similar to the socially rejected, lonely individuals have an increased sensitivity to the behaviors of others. Compared to non-lonely individuals, lonely individuals demonstrated enhanced recall abilities for positive and negative social information (Gardner, Pickett, Jefferies, & Knowles, 2005). Consequently, the fewer friends an individual reported to have, the more perceptive he or she was in interpreting vocal cues and emotional facial