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Exclusion from a group reduces your learning ability

9 November 2006
by Richard Conan-Davies

Social exclusion actually causes changes in a person's brain function and can lead to poor decision-making and a diminished learning ability according to brain scans by neuroscientists at the University of Georgia and San Diego State University. A link between social exclusion and the failure of self-control have been known by researchers for a long time. People rejected in social situations often respond by expressing aggression or performing poorly at school or work or abusing alcohol. In the study, led by Dr. Keith Campbell, 30 women undergraduates in a psychology course were asked to complete a personality questionnaire. The experiment leader then said they would "feed the answers into a computer," which was, in fact, untrue. Instead, half of the sample, selected randomly, was told their answers showed they would "end up alone" later in life. The others received a neutral assessment of their social interactions. "At this point, we gave each of the subjects a series of simple maths problems, taking 25 minutes, to solve on a computer screen in front of them while they were in the MEG (magnetoencephalography) machine," Explained Dr. Campbell. "We found that there was a direct link between social exclusion, brain activity and performance," explained Dr. Campbell.

The MEG data revealed that those in the social-exclusion group had clear differences in activity in the brain's occipital, parietal and prefrontal cortex regions. Those in the social-exclusion group also performed more poorly on the math questions. The inference is that social exclusion actually affects the brain's neural circuitry.

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