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Randomized Controlled Trial
. 2023 Jul:237:103956.
doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2023.103956. Epub 2023 Jun 7.

Do targets of ostracism truthfully communicate their emotional reactions to sources?

Erdem O Meral  1 , Dongning Ren  2 , Yvette van Osch  3 , Eric van Dijk  4 , Ilja van Beest  2
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Free article
Randomized Controlled Trial

Do targets of ostracism truthfully communicate their emotional reactions to sources?

Erdem O Meral et al. Acta Psychol (Amst). 2023 Jul.
Free article

Abstract

Ostracism triggers negative emotions such as sadness, anger, and hurt feelings. Do targets of ostracism truthfully share their emotions with the sources of ostracism? Drawing on past research on social-functional accounts of emotions and interpersonal emotion regulation, we investigated the possibility that targets may misrepresent their emotions (i.e., gaming emotions). We conducted three experiments (N = 1058; two pre-registered) using an online ball-tossing game, in which participants were randomly assigned to be included or ostracized. Consistent with the literature, we found that ostracized individuals were more hurt, sad, and angry than included individuals. However, we found little and inconsistent evidence that ostracized (vs included) individuals misrepresented their emotional reactions to the sources. Further, Bayesian analyses offered more support against misrepresentation of emotions. These findings suggest that targets of ostracism truthfully communicated their social pain to the sources.

Keywords: Cyberball; Emotions; Gaming emotions; Ostracism; Strategic communication.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. The authors indicate no conflict of interest. The line of studies received ethical approval from the Ethical Review Board of Tilburg University, The Netherlands (reference number: EC-2018.2017.103a). All data, analysis scripts and pre-registration files are available online in a publicly accessible online repository (https://osf.io/7vpqu/).

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