Three-Year-Old Children Detect Social Exclusion in Third-Party Interactions

Social sampling: Children track social choices to reason about status hierarchies.

“…Likewise, children were unlikely to say a member of this unselected common group was the leader (15% of children in Experiment 1 and 10% of children in Experiment 3). Together, these findings complement existing research demonstrating that even young children are highly attuned to social exclusion (e.g., Hwang et al, 2017; Killen et al, 2013; Killen & Rutland, 2011). In summary, for social choice, choosing and avoiding seem to go hand-in-hand; who is not chosen seems to matter just as much as who is.…”

Witnessed inclusion improves identification of Duchenne and non‐Duchenne smiles

“…Our study used witnessed inclusion and exclusion manipulations rather than direct ones. Previous research showed prosocial behaviors following witnessed exclusion similar to that following direct exclusion (Hwang et al, 2017;Marinović & Träuble, 2018;Masten et al, 2011;Over & Carpenter, 2009;Song et al, 2015), consistent with the perception-action model of empathy (Preston & de Waal, 2002). Our results, however, appear to be more in line with the cognitive-affective model (Singer & Lamm, 2009), which suggests that witnessing and direct exclusion may result in different responses.…”

“…By preschool, children exclude others (Crick et al, 1999), demonstrate a sensitivity to witnessed exclusion (Marinović & Träuble, 2018; Over & Carpenter, 2009; Song et al, 2015; Watson‐Jones et al, 2016), and recognise that excluded parties likely feel sad (Song et al, 2015). For children, witnessing exclusion results in mimicry (Watson‐Jones et al, 2014), prosocial behavior (Hwang et al, 2017), better memory for social information (Marinović & Träuble, 2018), and a desire for physical closeness (Marinović et al, 2017; Song et al, 2015; although see Stengelin et al, 2021). It appears that witnessed exclusion, too, produces similar behavioral responses in children and adults.…”

You can't play with us: First‐person ostracism affects infants' behavioral reactivity

“…In addition, comparably to adults, school‐aged ostracized children exhibited improvements in recognition of emotional facial expressions (Mermier et al, 2023), and engaged in more prosocial behaviors, such as action (Hopkins & Branigan, 2020) or language (Watson‐Jones et al, 2016) imitation. Furthermore, preschool‐aged children not only recognized ostracism (Hwang & Markson, 2020) and assigned a lower emotional state to individuals experiencing exclusion (Hwang et al, 2017; Stengelin et al, 2022), but also showed more affiliative imitation and facial mimicry when ostracized (de Klerk et al, 2020; Over & Carpenter, 2009; Vacaru et al, 2020; Watson‐Jones et al, 2016) compared to included children. Importantly, although frustrated verbal and non‐verbal behaviors did not appear to be influenced by the ostracism condition, more verbal and non‐verbal expressions of anxiety were highlighted in those children ostracized by an in‐group compared to an out‐group member (Watson‐Jones et al, 2016).…”