Maltreatment of children is a societal issue, leading to substantial adverse effects on children’s psychosocial development (Cicchetti & Toth, 2016; Schlensog-Schuster et al., 2022). For example, adolescents maltreated early in life show greater difficulties in emotion regulation, social, and cognitive processes than non-maltreated children (Lansford et al., 2002; Sullivan et al., 2008) . This leads to an increased risk of developing mental health difficulties including anxiety and depressive disorders (Kim & Cicchetti, 2010; Schlensog-Schuster et al., 2022). Unfortunately, the mechanisms underlying maltreatment-based vulnerability remain incompletely understood (Teicher & Samson, 2013), although atypical patterns of social functioning, especially under threat, are thought to account for much of this vulnerability (McCrory et al., 2019). Social exclusion or ostracism (i.e., being rejected, excluded and/or ignored within a social context), threatens basic human needs of belonging, control, meaningful existence, and self-esteem, and is often accompanied by negative affective arousal and psychological pain (Eisenberger et al., 2003; Wesselmann et al., 2012; Williams, 2009), as well as elevated rates of distress (Eisenberger et al., 2003; Eisenberger, 2015; Hartgerink et al., 2015). A Intrafamilial adversity, especially emotional abuse and neglect, appear to confer hypersensitivity to exclusion (Schulz et al., 2022; van den Berg et al., 2018) as well as signs of negative social expectancies (Gunther Moor et al., 2014). In light of the conceptual links between maltreatment and avoidant processing of emotion (White et al., 2021), we expect problems in accessing this negative affectivity within maltreated individuals with explicit self-reports of affect only. The reason for this expectancy is that children with those experiences report on trying to suppress the expression of negative affect in general as an attempt to minimize potential conflict with their respective caregivers (Shipman et al., 2005) and even suppress spontaneous facial mimicry (Ardizzi et al., 2016). So, for maltreated individuals we expect a higher emotional discordance (a discordance–congruence continuum, which reflects the extent to which felt and displayed emotions are aligned (Mesmer-Magnus et al., 2012, S. 7) than for non-maltreated subjects. In addition, self-reports, or explicit measures in general also tap into biasing factors such as conscious deliberation, reduced introspective ability, self-presentational concerns, and social desirability (Mitchell & Tetlock, 2015). This raises the question of how to capture a more holistic picture of affective experiences. Especially in children and adolescents with experiences of maltreatment masking affects seems to be a mechanism necessary to maintain a relationship to their caregivers and therefore necessary for survival. Nonetheless, since affects also comprise different components such as situation appraisal, subjective feelings, expressive behavior, physiological responses, and action preparation, multiple ways to approach and measure affective reactions were developed (Montag & Panksepp, 2017). Hence, for the present study we found implicit measures, assumed to assess affective evaluations, activated automatically, spontaneously, without effort, and, at times, without the subjects’ awareness, to be of interest. One of those measures, the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; Quirin et al., 2009) conceptualizes implicit affect as the automatic and pre-reflective component of the affective experience, providing information different from and sometimes above explicit measures (Weil et al., 2019). However, surprisingly little research has been conducted regarding the influence of social exclusion on implicit affect in comparison to explicit measures, particularly in maltreated children and adolescents. Ostracism has been widely researched within the Cyberball paradigm. The individuals playing the Cyberball game are instructed on playing with other players online, involving phases of fair play, exclusion, and reunion during a virtual ball-tossing game (Williams & Jarvis, 2006). To the best of our knowledge, only one study to date investigated a modified Cyberball game, with no significant effect on implicit affect as measured by the IPANAT (Ho et al., 2014). We want to highlight that within this study, exclusion was more subtle and the questionnaire altered as well, which leads to the idea of using the more “clear-cut” version of Cyberball and the IPANAT to investigate the effect on implicit affect again. Another innovation would be the sample of maltreated individuals as subjects potentially masking their feelings to their social environment. Therefore, the goal for the present study is to investigate the IPANAT as an implicit measure of affect in addition to self-report of affect to capture the subjects’ affective experience during social exclusion in a more complete approach. For the assessment of explicit affect, we chose the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Krohne et al., 1996). In approaching affective experience in this way, it could lead to a deeper understanding of how children with the experience of maltreatment in comparison to their non-maltreated counterparts undergo a threatful situation like social exclusion.