Several ambiguities in the social exclusion literature – in both the fields of social policy and development studies – fuel the common criticism that the concept is redundant with respect to already existing poverty approaches, particularly more multidimensional and processual approaches, such as relative or capability poverty. In order to resolve these ambiguities and to derive value-added fro...

People have a fundamental need to belong with others. Social exclusion impairs this need and has various effects on cognition, affect, and the behavior of excluded individuals. We have previously reported that activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (rVLPFC) could be a neurocognitive index of social exclusion (Kawamoto et al., 2012). In ...

This chapter examines recent social policy research on social exclusion, exploring the way in which the term has been conceptualized and defi ned. It discusses research on the multidimensional measurement of social exclusion, on the process of social exclusion, and on the use of social indicators to monitor trends in social exclusion across countries over time. The empirical research that has c...

In two studies we investigate whether social exclusion—a well-studied, common and quite painful social experience-influences people’s perceptions of novel social networks. In a first study, exclusion experiences led people to report that novel networks were more dense relative to those who had not been excluded. As predicted, this was true only for social networks; exclusion had no impact on pe...

Social exclusion inherently involves an element of expectancy violation, in that we expect other people to follow the unwritten rule to include us in social interactions. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we employed a unique modification of an interactive virtual ball-tossing game called "Cyberball" (Williams et al., 2000) and a novel paradigm called "Cybershape," in ...

Social exclusion is a complex social phenomenon with powerful negative consequences. Given the impact of social exclusion on mental and emotional health, an understanding of how perceptions of social exclusion develop over the course of a social interaction is important for advancing treatments aimed at lessening the harmful costs of being excluded. To date, most scientific examinations of soci...