Does Phubbing Always Elicit Social Pain? The Role of Belonging Context

Phubbing, a prevalent interpersonal phenomenon in which individuals divert their attention to their phones while neglecting their interaction partners during face-to-face interactions, has been associated with adverse psychological and relational outcomes, including social pain. However, the same "eyes-on-phone" behavior may not always be experienced as phubbing or evoke feelings of neglect and social pain. The present research examined whether belonging context shapes behavioral and neural responses to "eyes-on-phone" behavior during face-to-face interaction. In Study 1, 163 participants completed a scenario-based task that required them to judge how they felt about several stories, in which belonging context (positive, negative, unrelated) was crossed with attentional state (eyes-on-phone, eyes-on-you). In Study 2, 50 participants completed the Cyberball paradigm to manipulate different belonging contexts (positive, negative, unrelated) with 6 models, followed by an ERP experiment in which they judged whether images of these models displaying different attentional states (eyes-on-phone, eyes-on-you) made them feel neglect-related social pain. Across both studies, within "positive" contexts, "eyes-on-phone" behavior elicited greater social pain, including perceived neglect, emotional unpleasantness, and unwillingness to communicate (Study 1), as well as a greater tendency to endorse neglect-related social pain and larger P3 amplitudes (Study 2) than "eyes-on-you" behavior, whereas this pattern was not consistently observed in the "negative" or "unrelated" contexts. These findings indicate that phubbing is not inherently experienced as social pain. Rather, its social meaning depends on prior belonging context: a mismatch between contextual cues and subsequent attentional behavior may give rise to expectancy violations, which could contribute to social pain when the behavior is interpreted as neglectful.