Examining the Effects of Ostracism on Neural and Behavioral Indices of Cognitive Self-Regulation

The impact of ostracism on a target individual produces a number of negative consequences, including deficits in cognitive functioning related to self-regulation and general cognition. While such effects have been acknowledged, there is a lack of literature regarding the effect of ostracism on action monitoring in particular. Action monitoring is a self-regulatory process in which participants ensure the accuracy of their responses to a task or situation, the authors hypothesized that it would be adversely affected by an experience of ostracism. The goal of the current study was to utilize event-related brain potentials to examine the relationship of these two factors. The authors hypothesized that upon experiencing an event of ostracism, participants would exhibit a decrease in action monitoring capability, observable through both neural and behavioral measures. Specifically, the authors predicted that participants who experienced ostracism would exhibit decreased error-related negativity (ERN) amplitude, as well as decreased post-error response accuracy and a slowing of response time during subsequent execution of the flanker task. Results indicated that participants who experienced social exclusion exhibited decreases in both ERN amplitude and post-error accuracy in a flanker task. These findings provide both neural and behavioral support for the experimenter’s hypothesis that the action monitoring ability of ostracized individuals is compromised by their experience of social exclusion.