Sensitizing the Behavioral-Immune System: The Power of Social Pain

Abstract

People who believe they are invulnerable to infectious diseases often fail to protect themselves against the disease threats that others pose to them. The current paper hypothesizes that social pain—the experience of feeling interpersonally hurt or rejected—can sensitize the behavioral-immune system by giving people added reason to see others as worthy of protecting themselves against. We obtained four daily diary samples involving 2,794 participants who reported how hurt/rejected they felt by those they knew, how personally concerned they were about the spread of illness/COVID-19, and how vigilantly they engaged in self-protective behaviors to safeguard their health each day. An integrative data analysis revealed robust evidence that people who believed they were invulnerable to infectious disease engaged in more concerted efforts to protect themselves against the greater daily risk of contracting COVID-19 when being in acute social pain gave them added reason to see others as harmful to them.

Pursuing safety in social connection regulates the risk-regulation, social-safety, and behavioral-immune systems.

“…The current research adds greater nuance to this point in suggesting that the threat of contagious disease can also sensitize rather than desensitize people to their need for social connection. Consistent with this logic, recent research suggests that people who normally feel invulnerable to infectious disease take daily steps to physically protect themselves against COVID-19 when they have just been hurt by someone close to them, and thus, have reason to question the safety of social connection (S. L. Murray et al, 2022).…”

“…We used the program mpowsim (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmm/ software/mlpowsim/), an add-on program to the MLwiN multilevel modeling software developed by Browne and Golalizadeh (n.d.), to run simulation-based power analyses for our multilevel models. Parameters for this power analysis were drawn from the results of previously published research using similar multilevel models and similar outcome variables (e.g., S. L. Murray et al, 2022), with the added assumption that the conditioning intervention would have no main effect or two-way interactions, but would enter into threeway interactions between daily threat, individual differences in threat vulnerability, and condition with a small effect size of d = .1. The results of this simulation indicated that the proposed model would have an a priori power to reject the null hypothesis of no effect for the three-way interaction of .85 with 500 individual participants measured over 10 time points, and .91 with 600 individual participants measured over 10 time points.…”

“…As putative aspiring safety-seekers, individuals who feel more physically vulnerable to contagious diseases are also more likely to protect themselves against potentially infectious acquaintances than individuals who feel less physically vulnerable (Mortensen et al, 2010; Neuberg et al, 2011). Moreover, when people feel insufficiently safe in social connection because they have just been hurt by someone they know, even people who usually feel invulnerable to infection behave more like aspiring safety-seekers and take concrete steps to protect themselves against the daily risk of contracting COVID-19 (S. L. Murray et al, 2022).…”

“You want to be politically correct”: Opposition to political correctness predicts less adherence to COVID‐19 guidelines in the US

“…We recruited 300 participants from ResearchMatch, a volunteer health‐based online recruitment website that has been used for social psychological research on COVID‐19 (Murray et al, 2022), from January 9th to 21st, 2021 (https://www.researchmatch.org/). After removing 26 participants who either failed or did not respond to an attention check item, 274 participants were left for analysis.…”

Lovers in a Dangerous Time: Ecologically Motivated Relationship Safety Regulation

“…Given such representational overlay, the model assumes that acute experiences with vulnerability in the physical domain implicitly implicate the potential for safety/harm in the social/relationship domain (and vice versa). For instance, being rejected by close others can accentuate the threat implicit to physical pain ( Eisenberger et al, 2006 ;Kross et al, 2011 ) and contagious diseases ( Murray et al, 2022 ). In contrast, feeling connected to others can attenuate the threat implicit to both physical pain ( Master et al, 2009 ;Eisenberger et al, 2011 ;Wilson and Simpson, 2016 ;Yanagisawa et al, 2011 ) and contagious diseases ( Bressan, 2021 ;Tybur et al, 2020 ).…”