Salting a wound, building a callous, or throwing in the towel? The measurement and effects of chronic ostracism experiences

Reactions to ostracism—ignoring and excluding change over time. Williams's (2009) temporal model of ostracism suggests that there are three response stages: the initial (Reflexive) stage, the delayed (Reflective) stage, and the prolonged (Resignation) stage. This third stage has received little empirical attention. How do individual differences for prolonged ostracism experiences affect reactions to ostracism episodes? How do chronically ostracized individuals respond initially and how do they cope with exclusionary social interactions? This dissertation involved two stages: the development of a scale assessing prolonged ostracism experience and an experiment testing participants' responses to this scale and how that influenced immediate and delayed responses to a brief ostracism episode. In the first stage, I developed an Ostracism Experiences Scale consisting of 8-items (comprised of 2-Factors; 4-items for ignoring and 4 items for excluding). The sample combined participants from Howard University, a Historically Black University and participants from Purdue University, a Predominately White Institution. The demographic profile for participants in the Howard University sample included: n = 374 university students (123 men, 251 women) with a mean age of 20.74 years (SD = 9.55) and 99% self-reported as African American or a race/ethnicity of African descent. The demographic profile for participants in the Purdue University sample included: n = 1051 university students (543 men, 508 women) with a mean age of 19.59 years (SD = 1.64) and 76% self-reported as Caucasian or a race/ethnicity of European descent. Using the combined sample, the Ostracism Experiences Scales (OES) demonstrated sound internal reliability, factor correlations, and construct validity. For example, as expected in the Known-Groups test for construct validation, African Americans scored higher on ostracism experiences than Caucasians. Using a subset of the Purdue University sample (n=74), tests for convergent and discriminant validities were conducted. The results showed that regarding convergent validity, the scores on the Ostracism Experiences Scale only moderately correlated with scores on the Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire, r = .24 (Downey & Feldman, 1996) and the Loneliness Scale, r = .38 (Hughes, Waite, Hawkley, & Cacioppo, 2004). In relation to discriminant validity the OES scores correlated minimally with scores on the Social Monitoring Scale, r = -.01 (Snyder, 1974). These findings indicated that the Ostracism Experiences Scale was uniquely assessing the ostracism construct as well as identifying individual, plus group level differences as anticipated. In the experimental study, the participants' scores on the Ostracism Experiences Scale were used as a predictor variable in assessing immediate and delayed responses to manipulations of ostracism in a computer ball toss game called Cyberball. Using the same subset of Purdue University participants as mentioned for the validity tests, the demographic profile was as follows for participants in the experimental sample. The sample n = 74 consisted of university students (38 men, 36 women) with a mean age of 19.12 years (SD = 1.87) and 76% self-reported as Caucasian, the remaining were Asian – 13.6%, African American – 2.2%, Hispanic – 2.4%, and Other – 5.0%. The results indicated that the Ostracism Experiences Scale did not predict threatened needs (immediate or delayed), but did influence post-ostracism affect. Specifically, the individuals who had higher than average ostracism experiences showed longer persistence of sadness and anger. Implications for ostracism research are that chronically ostracized individuals have an impaired response pattern when responding to acute episodes of ostracism.