Being liked or not being liked: A study on social-media exclusion in a preadolescent population.

INTRODUCTION: Social-media can contribute to building up adolescents' relationships, but they might also bring negative exclusionary experiences. Being excluded is a subtle yet hurtful form of relational aggression, which affects people's psychological wellbeing, especially during developmental stages. In this study, we (1) analyzed the effects of social-media exclusion adapting the Ostracism Online paradigm to a cohort of Italian preadolescents (Mage = 11.47, 53% girls) and (2) tested the efficacy of two potential recovery strategies (i.e., social bonds vs. social surrogate). METHOD: Inclusionary status was manipulated through the number of "likes" participants received on a fictitious online social network. In the exclusion condition, participants received fewer likes than everyone else. In the inclusion condition, participants received a similar number of likes of other users. Then, all participants were asked to think of a significant positive relationship with a family member (social bonds), a celebrity (social surrogate), their present moment thoughts (control). RESULTS: Preadolescents who received fewer likes than others reported higher levels of need threat (i.e., belong, self-esteem, meaningful existence, but not control) and negative emotions. Moreover, the social-bonds strategy generally brought a faster psychological recovery from social-media exclusion than the control condition. The efficacy of social-surrogates strategy was greater for boys than for girls, probably due to different choices in their favorite celebrities. CONCLUSION: These findings show how offline life offers compensatory opportunities for adolescents' online life. When the lack of "Likes" signal exclusion on social-media, thinking of an existing social relationship help adolescents to cope with this negative experience.

Exposure to linguistic labels during childhood modulates the neural architecture of race categorical perception.

Perceptually categorizing a face to its racial belonging may have important consequences on interacting with people. However, race categorical perception (CP) has been scarcely investigated nor its developmental pathway. In this study, we tested the neurolinguistics rewiring hypothesis, stating that language acquisition modulates the brain processing of social perceptual categories. Accordingly, we investigated the electrophysiological correlates of race CP in a group of adults and children between 3 and 5 years of age. For both groups we found a greater modulation of the N400 connected with the processing of between category boundaries (i.e., faces belonging to different race groups) than within-category boundaries (i.e., different faces belonging to the same race group). This effect was the same in both adults and children, as shown by the comparable between-group amplitude of the differential wave (DW) elicited by the between-category faces. Remarkably, this effect was positively correlated with racial-labels acquisition, but not with age, in children. Finally, brain source analysis revealed the activation of a more modularized cortical network in adults than in children, with unique activation of the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which are areas connected to language processing. These are the first results accounting for an effect of language in rewiring brain connectedness when processing racial categories.

Perception of Caucasian and African faces in 5- to 9-month-old Caucasian infants: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study.

Race is an important perceptual cue for face perception. In adults, other-race faces are elaborated differently and remembered less well than own-race faces. Moreover, they show a different pattern of activation at the neural level. Developmental studies demonstrated that, during the first year of life, infants start to show the same behavioral pattern as adults in race perception. However, little is known about where and how in the brain other-race perception is elaborated in this population. The present study is the first to investigate the development of different neural responses to faces of different race in infants using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Specifically, a group of 5-month-old and a group of 9-month-old Caucasian infants were assessed during passing-viewing of Caucasian and African faces. Results showed a greater activation for African than for Caucasian faces for both oxy- and deoxy-hemoglobin. Moreover, results suggested a tendency for a progressive specialization between 5 and 9 months of age. This is the first fNIRS study investigating the neural correlates of race perception in Caucasian infants during the first year of life.

Race and Color: Two Sides of One Story? Development of Biases in Categorical Perception.

Categorical perception is a phenomenon that leads people to group stimuli into categories instead of perceiving their natural continua. This article reviews the literature of two biases connected with categorical perception: categorical color perception and the other-race effect. Although these two phenomena concern distant targets (colors and faces) and imply different biases (one attentional, one mnemonic), they share at least three commonalities. First, they both involve the chunking of continuous dimensions into categories. Second, adult categories are shaped by cultural processes. Third, infants' discrimination performance seems universal and guided by perception. In this article, it is proposed to look for a common developmental mechanism that clarifies the shift from a perceptual to a sociocognitive knowledge of the environment. New perspectives are discussed.