Social Exclusion and Working Memory in Adolescent Girls

Three female age groups were compared on a cyberball game an two working memory tasks in the study of Furmann, Casey, Speekenbrink, and Blakemore (2019). The three groups were girls in young adolescence, mid-adolescence and adults.

Social inclusion and social exclusion were created in a cyberball game. In the exclusion condition, the ball was not tossed to the participant. The authors wanted to know if social exclusion had detrimental effects on working memory performance. Two working memory tasks were given to the subjects. These were an n-back working memory task and a dot-matrix visuo-spatial working memory task. Participants had also to answer a mood questionnaire after ech cyberball condition.

It was found that mood was significantly lower in all three investigated groups after social exclusion, also on mood, no group differences were found.

There was found an age-dependend effect of social exclusion on cognitive performance of working memory. It was found that social exclusion affected only the young adolescent girls on the n-back working memory task, but not on the visuo-spatial working memory task. In the other two groups, performance was found to be not impaired.

It is suggestive that these results are indicative that some parts of the performance of the young adolescents' girls cognitive performance might be especially sensitive to social exclusion (Fuhrmann et al., 2019).