Does social rejection hurt? Exercise 4.45 (page 121) gives data from a study of whether social rejection causes activity in areas of the brain that are known to be activated by physical pain. The explanatory variable is a subject’s score on a test of “social distress” after being excluded from an activity. The response variable is activity in an area of the brain that responds to physical pain. Your scatterplot (Exercise 4.45) shows a positive linear relationship. The research report gives the correlation r and the P-value for a test that r is greater than 0. What are r and the P-value? (You can use Table E or you can get more accurate P-values for the correlation from regression software.) What do you conclude about the relationship?

Exercise 4.45:

Does social rejection hurt? We often describe our emotional reaction to social rejection as “pain.” Does social rejection cause activity in areas of the brain that are known to be activated by physical pain? If it does, we really do experience social and physical pain in similar ways. Psychologists first included and then deliberately excluded individuals from a social activity while they measured changes in brain activity. After each activity, the subjects filled out questionnaires that assessed how excluded they felt. Here are data for 13 subjects:²¹

The explanatory variable is “social distress” measured by each subject’s questionnaire score after exclusion relative to the score after inclusion. (So values greater than 1 show the degree of distress caused by exclusion.) The response variable is change in activity in a region of the brain that is activated by physical pain. Negative values show a decrease in activity, suggesting less distress. Discuss what the data show.