Short Research Note Cyberball The Impact of Ostracism on the Well-Being of Early Adolescents Sabrina Ruggieri 1 , Mons Bendixen 2 , Ute Gabriel 2 , and Françoise Alsaker 1 1 Department of Psychology, University of Bern, Switzerland 2 Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway Swiss Journal of Psychology, 72 (2), 2013, 103–109 DOI 10.1024/1421-0185/a000103 Abstract. We examined the effects of ostracism in early adolescent populations using the cyberball paradigm (Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000). Ninety-one Swiss school students, aged 10–14 years, were randomly assigned to the ostracism (24 girls, 23 boys) or the inclusion (23 girls, 21 boys) condition and were led to believe that they were playing cyberball with two other same-sex students. In reality, they were computer-generated confederates. We assessed self-reported levels of mood before and after playing the game as well as sense of belonging, self-esteem, meaningful existence, and control after the game. Compared to nonostracized students, adolescents in the ostracism condition reported significantly lower levels of positive mood after playing the game. Furthermore, they reported a lower sense of belonging and lower levels of self-esteem, meaningful existence, and control. The present results from a non-English-speaking sample correspond well to the few earlier findings in adolescent and adult populations by suggesting that even brief periods of ostracism with unknown others can lead to a significant decrease in well-being in these age groups. Keywords: cyberball, ostracism, social exclusion, early adolescents According to Baumeister and Leary (1995), humans are innately prepared to form relationships, and this prepared- ness is considered largely universal. As a subroutine of this adaptation, humans have developed a detection system sen- sitive to cues of being ostracized or socially excluded which is accompanied by emotion- and cognition-based alarm systems. Being ostracized is likely to produce in- creased sensations of pain and a decline in self-esteem (Leary, 2001; MacDonald & Leary, 2005; Williams, 2007). There is some evidence that sensitivity to exclusion is particularly high among adolescents as compared to young- er children or adults (Kloep, 1999; Larson & Richards, 1991), due to the increased importance placed on maintain- ing peer relationships in this period of life (Masten et al., 2009). Being rejected by peers is associated with a number of adverse outcomes including depression (Gazelle & Ladd, 2003), lower self-esteem (Leary, Tambor, Terdal, & Downs, 1995), poor academic achievement, and dropping out of school (Graham & Juvonen, 1998). Furthermore, re- peated rejection by peers is associated with suicide (Wil- liams, Forgas, & van Hippel, 2005) and has repeatedly been identified as a common trigger for school shootings (Leary, Kowalski, Smith, & Phillips, 2003). The consequences of being excluded are devastating and studies using longitu- dinal data indicate that peer rejection has a unidirectional negative effect on psychological health in children (Crick, 1996) and that peer rejection accentuates symptoms of de- pression, anxiety, and loneliness in vulnerable children (Nishina, Juvonen, & Witkow, 2005). In addition, peer group rejection has been found to be correlated with experiences of victimization by peers (Ladd & Troop-Gordon, 2003), higher levels of aggression (Prin- stein & La Greca, 2004; Reijntjes et al., 2010), and social withdrawal (Ollendick, Greene, Weist, & Oswald, 1990). These behavioral characteristics may, in turn, play an im- portant role in the group dynamics leading to rejection. Combined with the highly aversive experience of victim- ization, they may also influence findings on the conse- quences of rejection. Therefore, it is difficult to disentangle the effects of exclusion in studies conducted in naturalistic settings. In this study, we wanted to isolate the effects of exclusion in early adolescence using an experimental par- adigm constructed for this specific purpose (Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000). Since Baumeister and Leary’s (1995) seminal paper, many experimental studies have been carried out on adult populations, reporting levels of distress after brief periods of ostracism, social exclusion, and rejection. Different par- adigms have been utilized for this purpose, such as ball tossing (Williams, 1997), life alone (Baumeister, Twenge, & Nuss, 2002; Twenge, Baumeister, Tice, & Stucke, 2001), Swiss J. Psychol. 72 (2) © 2013 Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern