Wellbeing, Belonging and the Emotional Dynamics of Social Exclusion in Primary School

Abstract

It is widely recognised that positive peer relationships enhance children's social development and are instrumental in promoting their health, adjustment, and academic success. Conversely, negative peer relationships can significantly impede a child’s social development, academic learning, and overall social and neurobiological well-being. One prevalent and hostile form of negative peer relationships is the feeling of being socially excluded or ostracised by peers. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report published in 2019, an average of 9% of students across OECD member countries reported experiences of deliberate exclusion. In other words, close to one in every 10 students, across OECD member countries are subjected to this kind of social harm.

In contrast to many previous studies that have focused on investigating the perpetrators of social exclusion, for example, their motivations, this thesis focuses on the emotionally felt experiences of victims, with special reference to Australian primary schools and beyond. This study posits that social exclusion is not only a social harm; at the level of individual persons, it constitutes an existential harm that inflicts neurobiological damage on its victims. Some previous studies have provided generalised accounts of the pain endured by victims of social exclusion, as evidenced by their self-reporting. However, by adopting a multi-modal approach that gathers and analyses self-reported survey data alongside and together with electroencephalogram (EEG) data, this thesis pushes past the generalised notion of pain evoked by social exclusion, to provide a more nuanced account of the emotionally felt experiences of victims, especially how these experiences correlate with children’s feelings of emotional wellbeing and sense of belonging within the school environment.

A novel conceptual framework was developed to investigate the existential experience of social exclusion, drawing upon contemporary neuroscientific insights concerning the embodied, socially, and culturally embedded predictive Bayesian brain. This framework, which is consistent with the neurobiology of the brain as a dynamic, complex system, incorporates the notion of ‘here-and-now’ ‘feedback loops’ that operate at the intersection of the predictive, embodied brain and immediate contexts. By incorporating EEG and Event-Related Potential (ERP) technology into the research design, this study was able to investigate both the conscious but also, and significantly, the subconscious impacts of social exclusion in schools. It is believed that this begins to bridge a significant gap in the existing literature, which currently offers little insight into the conscious and virtually nothing regarding the subconscious impacts of social exclusion on students’ well-being and sense of belonging.

The empirical data garnered by this study not only corroborates much previous research showing that when being introduced to a group of similar-aged children, children exhibit an emotional desire to be accepted and to feel they belong within the new community. It provides significant, though provisional, evidence that real-time neural processes significantly correlate with a child’s self-reported responses regarding immediate distress from social exclusion, and with their sense of school belonging. Moreover, a strong sense of belonging to one’s own school acts as a protective factor, enhancing emotion regulation and reducing distress when threatened by an unknown peer’s rejection. In providing a more nuanced and comprehensive account of the experience of social exclusion that is hitherto unavailable in the literature, the findings of this study will go some way toward a better-informed platform for developing effective social exclusion intervention practices in Australian primary schools and beyond.