Social exclusion has a broad effect on individuals, including basic cognitive function, emotion and behaviour. Studies using the Cyberball game showed that social exclusion influenced executive control. However, the effects of different paradigms on subjects are different. The present study aimed to explore the effect of social exclusion through the life-alone paradigm. Participants were required to complete a questionnaire, and then they randomly received fake feedback (lonely or happy) about their future social lives. To test the cognitive control of the two groups, event related potential (ERP) was recorded when participants completed a letter flanker task. The results showed that compared with included subjects, excluded subjects had a larger congruency effect and showed a smaller N2 component in both congruent and incongruent trials; additionally, they did not show a larger P3 effect in incongruent compared to congruent trials. These results indicated that social exclusion decreased subjects’ cognitive control ability, including conflict detection and response inhibition. Time-frequency results found that ERSP magnitudes of the alpha band were significantly smaller in incongruent than congruent trials for included participants, but this was not the case for excluded subjects. This finding suggested that excluded subjects might have no available resources to resolve conflict in incongruent trials. Further, compared to the ostracism paradigm, future rejection led to a decline in conflict detection ability.
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