Popular media describe adverse effects of helicopter parents who provide intense support to grown children, but few studies have examined implications of such intense support. Grown children (N = 592, M age = 23.82 years, 53% female, 35% members of racial/ethnic minority groups) and their parents (n = 399, M age = 50.67 years, 52% female; 34% members of racial/ethnic minority groups) reported on the support they exchanged with one another. Intense support involved parents’ providing several types of support (e.g., financial, advice, emotional) many times a week. Parents and grown children who engaged in such frequent support viewed it as nonnormative (i.e., too much support), but grown children who received intense support reported better psychological adjustment and life satisfaction than grown children who did not receive intense support. Parents who perceived their grown children as needing too much support reported poorer life satisfaction. The discussion focuses on generational differences in the implications of intense parental involvement during young adulthood.

Ostracism is a common, yet painful social experience. Given the harmful consequences of ostracism, why would groups ostracize their members? Previous research suggests that ostracism is a form of social control used to influence those group members perceived as burdensome. The authors propose that individuals will ostracize a group member only when it is justified (i.e., the member seems burdensome) but will compensate a member who is ostracized undeservedly. In Study 1, a group member was ostracized undeservedly by the other players during an online ball-tossing game. Participants allocated more tosses to that ostracized group member than an included one, compensating the ostracized member. In Study 2, participants continued to compensate an ostracized group member, unless that member was burdensome. Participants indicated punitive motives for ostracizing a burdensome group member. These experimental studies extend research on when individuals use ostracism as social control.

Ostracism is a negative interpersonal experience that has been studied primarily in laboratory settings in which people have been ostracized by strangers and the motives for being ostracized have been ambiguous. This study extended this research by investigating ostracism as it occurs in daily life, focusing on people's reflective reactions to being ostracized in their daily lives and on the nature of the ostracism they experience. For 2 weeks, 40 participants (adults residing in the community) described what happened each time they felt ostracized using a diary method modeled after the Rochester Interaction Record (RIR; Wheeler & Nezlek, 1977). The questions in the diary were based on Williams's (2007) need-threat model of ostracism. Most ostracism episodes were from persons of equal status, and participants reported lower levels of belonging, control, self-esteem, and meaningful existence after being ostracized. Participants' needs were threatened more when friends or close others had ostracized them than when they had been ostracized by acquaintance and strangers, and they reacted more negatively to punitive, defensive, and oblivious ostracism as opposed to role based or ambiguous ostracism. This research suggests that the reflective effects of ostracism can vary as a function of who ostracizes someone and why people feel they have been ostracized.

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People may choose to move toward, move against, or move away in reaction to threatening social situations. Ostracism induces both prosocial behaviors (moving toward) and antisocial behaviors (moving against). One reason that moving away may be missing from these observed responses is the absence of including such a response in experiments. In four studies, we examined whether ostracized individuals would avail themselves of a moving away response (i.e., seeking solitude), if offered, and also whether one individual difference—introversion—predicted higher desires to move away. Correlational data (Study 1) showed that participants who reported more ostracism experiences indicated stronger desires to be alone; three experiments (Studies 2–4) demonstrated that manipulated ostracism experience increases the desire to be alone in a subsequent activity, especially among introverts. These findings suggest that ostracized individuals may desire a phase of solitude to cope with the social pain.