Emotions have long been regarded as disruptive forces that interfere with rational decision making. Increasingly, however, emotion researchers have come to acknowledge the functional aspects of emotions. According to a social-functional perspective, emotions function as social communication, conveying information about one’s feelings and intentions. In negotiation, a social functional account of emotions assumes that (1) communicated emotions lead to informational inferences, and (2) these informational inferences have behavioral consequences for. Emotions thereby serve as positive or negative incentives for other people’s behavior.

Social exclusion is everywhere and the costs for those involved are huge. Social exclusion has been found to cause pain and distress. These findings suggest that humans are hardwired to belong to a group. In my work I study the effects of social exclusion and which factors mitigate the negative experience of social exclusion. Moreover, I also investigate the act of social exclusion. I investigate in which situations people are willing to exclude others and in which situations people are exclusion averse. I use behavioral as well as neuroscientific measures to investigate the experience and the act of exclusion and I also try to compare the effects of social exclusion to other types of rejection.

• social exclusion