Abstract: Social exclusion is a major stressor that affects mental health and social adjustment. Its effects on emotional experience and emotional information processing are shaped by the duration and frequency of exclusion. Short-term social exclusion usually elicits immediate negative emotions, including social pain, sadness, and anger. Under highly arousing and self-relevant conditions, it may also lead to emotional numbness as a defensive response. These effects involve the dynamic interaction of neural systems related to pain processing and emotion regulation. Long-term social exclusion is associated with persistent negative emotional outcomes and may show age-related patterns across the life span. In adolescence, it is more often linked to anxiety and emotion dysregulation associated with early adversity. In young adulthood, it is mainly related to loneliness and depressive tendencies. In adulthood, it may undermine organizational belonging and increase anxiety about career prospects. In older adulthood, it may contribute to a vicious cycle of loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Regarding emotional information processing, short-term exclusion may activate either reconnection or self-protection motives, depending on the perceived possibility of repairing social relationships. These motives can produce rapid attentional biases toward positive or threatening social cues, temporary threat-related interpretation biases, and a greater tendency to use attentional distraction as an emotion regulation strategy. Given the limited empirical evidence directly examining the effects of long-term social exclusion on emotional information processing, this review draws cautious inferences from indirect evidence concerning related constructs, such as chronic loneliness, persistent peer rejection, and repeated exclusion in daily life. Long-term social exclusion may be associated with persistent social threat-processing tendencies, including early vigilance followed by later avoidance of threat cues, negative cognitive schemas, and a preference for maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. Future research should develop standardized experimental paradigms and ecologically valid materials, and combine multimodal cognitive neuroscience methods to clarify the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the effects of short- and long-term social exclusion on emotional processing. Such work may help identify neural targets for intervention, evaluate effective and generalizable cognitive regulation strategies, and provide a theoretical basis for preventing and treating emotional problems related to social exclusion.

Key words: short-term social exclusion, long-term social exclusion, emotional experience, emotional information processing, temporal need-threat model