Being Left Out Makes the Brain Cling to Social Memories, Study Finds

Being excluded from a conversation, a group chat, or a game of catch stings in a way that almost everyone recognizes instinctively. But what does that sting do to memory itself? A new pair of experiments published in Current Psychology suggests that social exclusion does not merely make people feel bad; it changes how they deliberately remember and forget socially charged information. The study, led by Li’an Wang and Tiantian Zhang of Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, China, with Xiaoli Yang and Yongli Zhang, found that people who had just been socially excluded largely lost their ability to intentionally forget social material, and that this disruption depended strikingly on whether the material was presented as words or as pictures.

The cognitive mechanism at the heart of the research is called directed forgetting, a well-established laboratory phenomenon first documented in the late 1960s. In the classic item-method version of the paradigm, participants view a series of items one at a time, and after each item they receive an instruction to either remember it or forget it. Later, in a surprise memory test, people reliably recall more of the to-be-remembered items than the to-be-forgotten ones. Psychologists interpret this as evidence that memory is not a passive recording device but an actively managed system: when told to forget, people can disengage attention, suppress encoding, or inhibit the just-formed trace. A 2021 meta-analysis by Hall and colleagues confirmed that this effect is robust, though it weakens for emotional material, which tends to resist intentional forgetting because it captures attention and resources automatically.

Social exclusion, meanwhile, has long been known to reshape cognition. According to Kipling Williams’s influential temporal need-threat model, ostracism immediately threatens fundamental needs for belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. Decades of research have shown downstream consequences: excluded people become hypervigilant to signs of social acceptance, show altered attention to smiling faces, and often suffer reduced performance on working memory and executive control tasks. Studies by DeWall and colleagues revealed a fascinating split: excluded individuals become faster at detecting cues of acceptance, while lonely individuals attend more closely to social threat. Other work by Xu and colleagues demonstrated that exclusion measurably weakens the storage capacity and attentional filtering capacity of visual working memory. What remained unclear was whether exclusion would interfere with the deliberate, top-down control process that directed forgetting requires, and whether any such interference would apply equally to all kinds of social content.

To answer that question, the Chinese research team ran two experiments using the item-method directed forgetting paradigm, manipulating both the emotional-social category of the stimuli and their presentation format. Participants first experienced either social exclusion or social inclusion in a computer-based ball-tossing game, a widely used ostracism induction known as Cyberball, developed by Williams and Jarvis. In this virtual game, participants believe they are tossing a ball with two other players online; in the exclusion condition, the other players gradually stop throwing the ball to them entirely, producing a reliable feeling of being left out. After this manipulation, participants completed the directed forgetting task, viewing a series of social stimuli and receiving remember or forget instructions after each one.

The stimuli fell into three categories: verbal or pictorial depictions of social acceptance, such as being welcomed into a group; depictions of social rejection, such as being turned away; and socially neutral scenes. The first experiment tested 68 participants with an average age of about 23, using verbal materials, meaning written descriptions of social situations. The second experiment tested 62 participants with an average age of about 20, using pictorial materials drawn from a validated image database of social inclusion and exclusion scenes featuring young Asian adults. This design allowed the researchers to ask not just whether exclusion disrupts directed forgetting, but whether the disruption depends on what kind of social information is involved and how it is delivered to the senses.

The results from the verbal experiment were nuanced and, in places, counterintuitive. Among participants who had been included in the ball-tossing game, the expected directed forgetting pattern appeared: they could remember accepted items and suppress rejected ones in line with the instructions. Among excluded participants, however, a significant directed forgetting effect emerged only for verbal information conveying social acceptance. In other words, after being ostracized, people retained deliberate memory control over words describing acceptance, but their ability to intentionally forget other categories of verbal social information was compromised. The researchers interpret this through the lens of the belonging motive: excluded individuals are known to scan the environment for signals that they might be re-accepted, and words describing acceptance may therefore receive prioritized, elaborated processing that supports intentional memory regulation rather than undermining it.

The second experiment, using pictures, told a starker story. Excluded participants showed no significant directed forgetting effects at all, for pictorial information depicting social acceptance, social rejection, or socially neutral situations. The deliberate control of memory, which intact participants typically exercise over pictures just as they do over words, appeared to break down entirely under exclusion when the material was visual. The researchers suggest a likely technical explanation rooted in the picture superiority effect, the long-documented finding that images are encoded more richly and remembered better than words. Pictures of social scenes engage perceptual and conceptual processing simultaneously and automatically, demanding more of the very executive resources that exclusion has been shown to deplete. When the control system is weakened and the material is maximally memorable, intentional forgetting may simply fail.

Exploratory comparisons between the two experiments further indicated that directed forgetting may operate differently for verbal and pictorial materials, a point with real theoretical weight. Most models of item-method directed forgetting invoke selective rehearsal and attentional disengagement as the engine of the effect, and both processes are known to be resource-dependent. Emotional pictures, as event-related potential studies by Hauswald, van Hooff, and Gallant have shown, trigger enhanced early attentional processing that resists later inhibition. If exclusion simultaneously increases the motivational salience of social images and drains the cognitive control capacity needed to suppress them, the complete absence of directed forgetting for pictures among excluded participants becomes coherent: the to-be-forgotten social images were never properly disengaged from in the first place.

The findings carry implications well beyond the laboratory. Forgetting is increasingly understood as an adaptive feature of cognition rather than a failure, with recent theoretical work describing it as a form of active engram plasticity that keeps memory systems flexible and future-oriented. If social exclusion strips people of this adaptive control precisely for social information, it may help explain why rejected individuals ruminate on social episodes, replaying exclusionary moments they would benefit from setting aside. Clinically, the results resonate with models of rejection sensitivity and social anxiety, in which attentional bias toward social threat sustains distress. The study also carries methodological lessons for memory researchers: the format of experimental stimuli, word versus image, is not a trivial detail but a variable that can determine whether an effect appears at all under emotional stress.

The authors are careful about scope. The experiments were conducted with young Chinese adults, the exclusion manipulation was a brief laboratory episode rather than chronic ostracism, and the comparisons between verbal and pictorial conditions were exploratory rather than pre-registered confirmations. Sample sizes of 68 and 62 are respectable for this paradigm but leave room for replication with larger and more diverse cohorts. Still, the contribution is clear: by testing acceptance-related, rejection-related, and neutral social information in two formats, the study provides multi-format evidence for the cognitive consequences of social exclusion and moves the field toward a more differentiated understanding of how the pain of being left out reshapes what we can, and cannot, choose to forget. The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and provincial science funds in Gansu, and the authors report no conflicts of interest.

Subject of Research: The effect of social exclusion on directed forgetting of verbal and pictorial social information

Article Title: Social exclusion disrupts directed forgetting of social information: evidence from verbal and pictorial stimuli

Article References: Wang, L., Zhang, T., Yang, X., & Zhang, Y. (2026). Social exclusion disrupts directed forgetting of social information: evidence from verbal and pictorial stimuli. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1439. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09988-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09988-5

Keywords: social exclusion, directed forgetting, memory, ostracism, item-method paradigm, social acceptance, social rejection, picture superiority effect, cognitive control, working memory, Cyberball, Current Psychology