Coping with Ostracism: a Neuroscientific Investigation of Mindset and Autistic Characteristics

Ostracism, or the perception of being ignored by others, is an aversive behavior that is universal to the human species. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at an increased risk for ostracism over their lifetime. As ostracism can lead to enduring negative mental health outcomes, it is important to understand how individuals, especially autistic individuals, cope with these negative feelings. To better understand what influences coping responses to ostracism, this dissertation sought to develop and evaluate a new social and emotional mindset scale, examine how autistic characteristics and social and emotional mindset influence immediate behavioral and neural responses to ostracism, and investigate how immediate responses to ostracism, autistic characteristics, and social and emotional mindset influence later coping responses to ostracism. For the development of the social and emotional mindset scale, 413 adult participants completed the revised Social and Emotional Mindset Scale. Psychometric analyses revealed a simple, unidimensional structure. However, further examination of item level data found a mismatch between item and person locations indicating that the scale may not accurately identify differences between the two types of social and emotional mindset. Fifty separate adult participants completed a battery of survey measures that evaluated autistic characteristics and social and emotional mindset, a task that manipulated ostracism, and another task that measured delayed coping responses. Overall, results indicated that ostracism significantly increases self-reported reflexive feelings of distress but not distress as measured by brain activation. Additionally, results suggest that immediate feelings of distress may moderate the effect social and emotional mindset have on later coping responses to ostracism. Collectively, these studies did not provide evidence for connections to autistic characteristics but did provide initial evidence that differences in social and emotional mindset could influence coping responses to ostracism. Taken together with previous research that has demonstrated improved outcomes from interventions that emphasize incremental implicit theories of mindset, the present findings can better inform future studies that examine social and emotional mindset in social and emotional learning programs or interventions to help individuals remain resilient in the face of ostracism.