What Happens in Your Mind and Brain When You Are Excluded from a Social Activity?

In school and in everyday life, we sometimes experience rejection by classmates, or we might see someone being excluded from an activity. What do excluded individuals feel? How does the brain process information about being socially excluded? In the past few decades, psychologists and social neuroscientists have investigated the influence of social exclusion on our mind, brain, and behavior. Social exclusion is a complex and ambiguous phenomenon, and therefore, we process information about it dynamically and often cope with it flexibly. In this article, I have described the dynamic effects of social exclusion on our mind, brain, and behavior by developing a model of what happens in the brain and the actions people take upon experiencing social exclusion.