Abstract
Background: Human beings have a basic need for healthy social connections. In our everyday lives, being rejected or excluded when we try to establish or maintain social connections produces negative affect. However, when studied in the laboratory, psychologists rarely find that social exclusion or social rejection induces a negative affective response. Objectives: To better explain the discrepancy between real-life and laboratory findings, three key issues with tasks used to induce feelings of exclusion or rejection are identified: believability, participant engagement and the meaningfulness of the exclusion or rejection. Here, I present a novel social feedback paradigm designed to be believable, engage participants and induce meaningful rejection-related negative affect. Methods: The task was designed to resemble an online dat- ing app and implemented in Psychopy software. Participants engaged with the task in three separate parts: 1) they created their own profile consisting of a selfie and an introductory text. 2) They viewed and rated similar ‘profiles’ of men and/or women (depending on their prefer- ence) that I had created. 3) In the social feedback part of the task, participants received purported ‘feedback’ from others, both rejection and acceptance. Task validation: I created and ran a poll to determine suitable adjectives for the rejection and acceptance feedback. Fourteen participants who participated in a larger mixed-design fMRI psychopharmacological pilot study completed the task. A separate larger behavioral pilot of the task was planned, but cancelled due to COVID 19-restrictions. Results: Analyses revealed that participant felt worse receiving negative feedback compared to positive feedback, but the average affective re- sponse to negative feedback was still close to zero on a -10 to 10 scale. Descriptive analyses did not identify any strong moderators. Conclusion: A small pilot study of a novel task failed to produce an affective response that was substantially stronger than existing tasks. Further investigation is needed to properly assess if the differences between real world and laboratory findings are explainable by believability, participant engagement or meaningfulness.