“I Feel Your Pain”: The effects of observing ostracism on the ostracism detection system

Ostracism—being ignored and excluded—is a painful experience with negative psychological consequences. Social psychologists (Kerr and Levine, 2008, Spoor and Williams, 2007) argue humans have an evolved system for automatically detecting cues of ostracism and exclusion. Detection elicits pain and threats to fundamental needs. We hypothesize simply observing ostracism will cause negative affect and need threat in the observer. Participants...