14- Need to Belong Flashcards
1- What is the fundamental need to belong? How can we satisfy it?
The Fundamental Need to Belong
(Baumeister & Leary, 1995)* Humans have a “pervasive drive to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of lasting, positive, significant interpersonal relationships”
e.g. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: belongingness and love needs are the first psychological needs after the physical needs
* “A great deal of human behavior and thought is caused by this
fundamental interpersonal motive
To satisfy this need…
1. Frequent pleasant
interactions
2. Long-lasting caring
relationships
2- What evidence is there?
Need satisfaction/ not met should influence emotions
If Fundamental Need, Then…
(Baumeister & Leary, 1995)
1. Need satisfaction/ not met should influence emotions
2. Unmet need should motivate behaviour to satisfy it
3. Satiation and substitution
4. Chronic need satisfaction/ frustration should be related to health outcomes
5. Universal
- Need satisfaction/ not met should influence emotions
Status of Need to Belong Affects Emotions(Baumeister & Leary, 1995)
* Creating new social bonds is strongly associated with positive feelings
- Falling in love
- Celebration of life events center around new relationships (e.g., weddings,
religious ceremonies)
- Life satisfaction strongly correlated with having some close relationships
* The loss of social bonds is strongly associated with
negative feelings
- Highly upsetting when separation/loss happens
- Reluctance to end bad relationships
3- What evidence is there? Unmet need should motivate behaviour to satisfy it
- Unmet need should motivate behaviour to satisfy it
Social Reconnection Hypothesis (Leary, 2010)
* Social rejection: others have little desire to include you in their social group or relationships
- Thwarted need to belong
- Associated with negative feelings
* Social reconnection hypothesis: Feeling rejected motivates us to seek out new bonds and strengthen existing ones
- Thus, negative feelings associated with rejection are adaptive
Evidence for Social Reconnection Hypothesis
* Does rejection lead to a desire for social contact?
* Method:
* “Future alone” paradigm (future alone vs. future belonging)
* Participants complete personality test and receive fake feedback
* “To what extent would you prefer doing the next task with a few other
people?”
Results:
* “Rejected” participants showed strongest desire to work with others
* “Rejected” participants also showed:
- Greater interest to meet and connect with new friends - Greater desire to join student group to connect with others
- Higher ratings of attractiveness and sociability when evaluating another person
Really?
* But rejection is also associated with withdrawal and even aggression
sometimes
* Majority of school shooters in the US had experienced chronic rejection (Leary et al., 2003)
* In the lab, rejected people:
- Evaluated another person more negatively
- Delivered longer and louder blasts of aversive noise to the rejector
- Gave rejector hot sauce knowing that they hate spicy food
Intensity of Rejection as a Moderator
* Does intensity of rejection moderate reactions to rejection?
* Method:
* Manipulated intensity of rejection using Cyberball paradigm
* Excluded by all 3 players, excluded by 2, excluded by 1, included by all
* Prepared food for another participant (confederate) not involved in in Cyberball
* This other person hates spicy food
* How much hot sauce do they give this other person?
Results:
* Being accepted by even one person greatly reduces likelihood of rejected person
lashing out
* Additional acceptance had decreasing incremental effect
Rejection Sensitivity and Hot Sauce
* Rejection elicited aggression only in those high in rejection sensitivity
Implications
* Rejection promotes affiliation only if we see connecting with others as
a realistic, and viable option: * E.g., Need to feel at least minimally accepted by others * E.g., Need to not generally fear rejection/expect others to reject us (low rejection sensitivity)
4- What evidence is there?
Satiation and substitution
- Satiation and substitution
Satiation
* Average student’s meaningful interactions happen with same 6
people
* People generally prioritize having a few close friends over having many, less close friends
Substitution
* As a romantic relationship develops, people generally
spend less time with other people, including old
friends
* People are more likely to cheat in relationships in
which they feel lonely/ rejected
- Indication that need to belong is not met
* We replace relationships that have ended with new
ones
* What if we’re “hungry” for belonging and there’s no
one to connect with?
Creative Substitutions to Meet Need to Belong
* Looking to “para-social relationships”
* Ascribing human characteristics to non-humans (anthropomorphism)
* Pets * Technology * Objects
Seeing Life Where There Isn’t
* People vary in the strength of their chronic need to belong
* Does stronger need to belong make us willing to lower bar for what
we accept as social connection?
* To test this, created animacy judgement task…
- Animacy threshold: point at which participant detects animacy
- Lower threshold = face has less human features
* Self-report personal need to belong
- “I want other people to accept me”
* Hypothesis: Higher need to belong should lower threshold to detect
animacy (life)
Results:
* Need to belong lowers threshold for detecting animacy
* Adaptive because allows us to maximize opportunities to renew relationships
* Follow-up study where experimentally manipulated feelings of social connection
* Future alone paradigm
* Results:
* People who received “future alone” feedback had a
lower animacy threshold than those who received
“future belong” feedback
* Suggests that social disconnection makes us
lower the bar for acceptable social contact
5- What evidence is there?
Chronic need satisfaction/ frustration should be related to health outcomes
- Chronic need satisfaction/ frustration should be related to health outcomes
Consequences of Belonging Deprivation (Baumeister & Leary, 1995)
* Mental health
- Lack of adequate supportive relationships associated with increased stress
- Children who grew up not receiving adequate emotional attention from
caregivers have poorer mental health
* Morbidity and immune response
- Lonely people take longer to recover from stress, illness, injury
* Mortality
Belonging Lowers Mortality Risk
* Meta-analysis of 148 studies (308,849 participants) looking at effects of
social connection on physical health
* Results: People who have stronger social relationships are 50% more likely to survive in a given time frame than those who have weaker
relationships
* Controlling for age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow-up period
* The influence of social relationships on mortality is comparable, and even exceeds, the effect of well-established risk factors for mortality
6- What evidence is there?
Universal
Evolutionary Basis of Need to Belong
* Social connection critical for survival
- Attachment system’s function is to ensure infants’
proximity to caregivers so that they survive
- Connection to group
* Connection to group
- Fend off predators
- Share labor, food, care for young
* Led to development of biological mechanism to
motivate us to seek social groups and lasting
relationships
Physical and Social Pain
* Pain system as biological mechanism underlying need to belong
- Evolutionarily older physical pain system appropriated to prevent separation
from others
Shared vocabulary between physical and social pain
Neural Correlates of Physical Pain
* Activation in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) associated with emotional
aspect of physical pain
Neural Correlates of Social Pain
* Is social pain also processed in dACC?
* Method:
* Participants played Cyberball while undergoing fMRI scan
* Either included or excluded in game
* Assessed feelings of rejection
Results:
* dACC activity associated with feelings of rejection
* Evidence that physical and social pain are processed in the same brain region
Physical and Social Pain Overlap
* Are people that are more sensitive to physical pain also more sensitive
to social pain?
* Method:
* Measured pain threshold by applying heat to participant’s hand and they had to
say when “very unpleasant”
* Played Cyberball
Results:
* Pain sensitivity associated with sensitivity to social exclusion
Physical and Social Pain Overlap
* Does easing physical pain also ease social pain?
* Method:
* Experimental group: Daily dose of Tylenol (acetaminophen)
for 3 weeks
* Control group: Placebo for 3 weeks
* Feelings of social exclusions assessed via:
Daily evening self-report of hurt feelings * Cyberball with fMRI after 3 weeks
* Hypothesis: Tylenol would reduce feelings of social
exclusion
Results:
* Tylenol group reported fewer hurt feelings (vs. placebo group)
* Tylenol group showed less dACC activation after exclusion
7- Summary of evidence for fundamental need to belong
- Presence of close relationships is closely tied to happiness and absence of relationships triggers intense distress
- Support for social reconnection hypothesis after rejection
* But moderated by intensity and personality - We don’t seek out social connection when this need is satiated, and we have many ways of different ways of meeting need (substitution)
- Close relationships have a profound impact on mental and physical health, including mortality
- Overlap in neural pathways between physical and social pain indicates innateness and universality
