If you happen to be affected a lack of response to a request to be added as a friend on Facebook, a “defriending” or “unfriending” (to be deleted a list of friends) or because someone stops following you on Twitter, you’re not alone, reports a CNN article.
Many feel a pinch and a surprise at the rejection in social networks. “People tend to think that these relationships are trivial and not very deep, but we are moving towards it, have a lot of our communications that are played over the Internet,” said Kip Williams, a researcher in social psychology at the Purdue University. “That’s how it evolves and we understand our value. People care about how many online friends they have.”
Or how many people follow them on Twitter. New application made available this year Qwitter, also allows members of the network of who ceased to follow them and what tweet (message) may be removed.
The rejection in social networks can hurt more than a snub in person because people are usually more polite face-to-face than it is online. “I think it is often much worse online where people take advantage of relative anonymity to be more cruel than they would otherwise,” says Jean Twenga, a psychologist at the University of San Diego who has studied how social networks affect the development of personality.
The physiological reactions to rejection are that relationships are online or face to face, found Baldwin Way, a researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles who studies the brain responses to social rejection.
The pain, he says, includes two components. In case of physical pain, part of the brain identifies and locates the pain. Another part reacts emotionally. This last part seems to be activated in case of emotional pain, for example when a person is excluded or rejected.
To the surprise of the researcher, the neurological response to the rejection occurs even when the discharge takes place online, in the absence of body language, intonations of voice and other aspects of face to face relationships which may influence the how the discharge is seen and felt.
“If you had asked me a few years ago, if the discharge line has the same effect in person, I said no,” he said. “I thought that doing something in person had a greater effect than online, but interesting data suggest that mental representations are as powerful as the physical reality.”
These data include studies of Williams, in which participants played a virtual ball game with two other icons. In a group participants played throughout the duration of the game in another, they were ignored for the greater part of the game The second group reported feelings of anger and lower levels of self-esteem. More than that, if participants believed to play with humans does not seem to affect the feelings of rejection. “Even when people are rejected by the computer, they respond,” said Twenga.