社会拒绝的神经生理反应及其理论解释

The Neural Physiological Reaction Elicited by Social Rejection and Related Theory

社会拒绝是社会应激的一个重要方面,心理学领域已对此作出较为深入的研究。已经有许多研究发现社会拒绝能够引起人们不同方面的神经生理反应,在此基础上研究者已提出不同的理论对这些神经生理反应进行解释。文章主要将当前心理学领域对社会拒绝引起的主要的神经生理反应的研究结果加以总结,形成比较系统的概括,并对目前学界对社会拒绝应激反应的主要理论解释加以介绍。

As an important aspect of social stress, social rejection has been studied deeply by psychological field. Rejection is very common in daily life, researchers usually use term social exclusion, or interpersonal rejection, to descript the phenomena that individual is be rejected or refused by a social organizations or others, which leads to one＇s belonging needs and the relationship demand could not be satisfied. Many studies have found that social rejection would cause different neurophysiological reac tions, researchers also have proposed different theories to explain these reactions. Some previous studies demonstrated more and more clearly that physiological system of stress reaction, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical system （ HPA）, has played a vital role in the regulation of emotional stress events impact on the physical and mental health. The HPA axis response is acom ponent of human physiological stress reaction, also could be elicited by social rejection. Cortisol response is the most important and most obvious indicator of the HPA axis response , researchers prefer to meter cortisol alteration to obtain direct measurement of the physiological response to social rejection. The startle reflex which is indexed by magnitude of facial and body muscles variation is the second main physiological response of rejection, in previous experiments researchers mainly use the startle probe paradigm to measure the startle response which is activated in a particular rejection context. Both of these physiological responses have corresponding neurophysiologic basis, therefore some studies mainly applying brain functional magnetic resonance imaging （ fMRI） explore the brain mechanisms of response to rejection. These studies reveal some major brain regions of response to social rejection such as the medial prefrontal cortex （mPFC）, anterior cingulate cortex （ACC）, amygdale. Based on the studies about neurophysiologic response of social rejection, psychologists also propose a number of theoretical models to explain its inner mechanism. These theories involved social self theory and coping theory. The social self theory includes the social pain theory and the social self-preservation theory. The former emphasizes the role of the perception of social pain on moderation response to social rejection. The social self-preservation theory is that in order to protect social self individual react to social rejection sensitively. The coping theory emphasizes the role of individual factors in the process of stress response, these individual factors contain such as personality traits, coping style, cognitive processes and so on. The coping theory holds that these factors could explain the individual differences on physiological responses to rejection. Different researchers have put forward to deal with the characteristics-oriented coping theory, process-oriented coping theory model and characteristics- process theory to explain the stress response. The present study only introduces how individual differences impact the neural physiological reaction on rejection in the characteristics-oriented coping theory and the process-oriented coping theory separately.