[The others and I: How social interactions change the perception of other persons. The Cyberball paradigm and its indications in the migration context].

What effect does social exclusion have on the perception of the other person and how can this effect be recorded with the help of experimental methods? Answering this question can provide psychologists, sociologists and clinicians with valuable insights for understanding as well as for concrete interaction with the people or groups concerned. Social groups that are particularly frequently confronted with social exclusion include people with mental illness, migrants and ethnic minorities. In this article we present the results of an experimental preliminary study on healthy volunteers in which we used a modified version of the cyberball paradigm to investigate the effects of social exclusion on the spontaneous assessment of personality traits such as attractiveness, trustworthiness, aggressiveness and dominance. The results of our study show that these effects can be quantified with the help of the cyberball paradigm and that the perception of the other person changes after a relatively short period of social interaction depending on their valence. Against the background of these findings, we discuss the potential of this paradigm to investigate social factors that can play a role in the development of mental illness in migrants and discuss the particularities to be considered in prospective application in the risk groups mentioned above.