Does Rejection Still Hurt? Examining the Effects of Network Attention and Exposure to Online Social Exclusion

Social media platforms archive the content and flow of social exchange across communication networks. This may present challenges for individuals because using these platforms increases the probability of observing exchanges among their friends in which they were unintentionally excluded. This study randomly assigned 194 participants to conditions where they were presented with written scenarios describing hypothetical online conversations between their close friends in which they were excluded or included. Results suggest that participants in the excluded condition experienced the most negative and least positive emotional responses. Further, participants with the tendency to devote cognitive resources to understanding their social networks—a construct we call network attention—were particularly sensitive to the stimuli. Network attention predicted negative emotional responses in the excluded condition and positive emotional responses in the included condition. Results are discussed in the context of communication and cognition via social media.