Abstract Social exclusion is generally defined as the need of people’s belongingness and social relationships, which is thwarted owing to being excluded by a group or other people. Relevant researches suggest that social exclusion may affect the cognition, emotion and behavior. During a social event, people are often disturbed by the environment. So self-focused attention may be affected by the negative social exclusion. There are two types of explicit and implicit self-focused attention. It is anticipated that social exclusion affects the different types of self-focused attention. And that, power refers to the notion that is as asymmetric control over valuable resources and outcomes within a specific situation and set of social relations. Based on these we expect that power has an influence on the relationship between social exclusion and self-focused attention as the moderating variable. Chinese college students were selected as participants. In Experiment 1, the aim was to explore the effect of social exclusion on self-focused attention. The experiment was adopted 2(exclusion situation: the recall vs. the real)?2(exclusion type: the ignored vs. the rejected) between-group design.80 students were selected and grouped into four types of experiment condition randomly. The number of the subjects was 20 in each group. In the recall-ignored and recall-rejected condition, the subjects must write the experience of being excluded. While in the real- ignored and real-rejected condition, the subjects were informed that they were joining in an activity to set up the real situation. After that, all the subjects evaluated the sense of exclusion by themselves. Then they would write the scale of self-focused attention and finished Stroop Test for the implicit measurement. The results showed that both the recall and the real social exclusion had a significant influence on the explicit and implicit self-focused attention. The ignored had higher self-focused attention in contrast to the rejected. The findings provided support for the hypothesis that social exclusion affected the self-focused attention. Experiment 2 further explored the role of power in the relationship between social exclusion and self-focused attention. This experiment used word-search test priming power, which was a common kind paradigm of power’s priming. 180 college students were randomly assigned to any one of the experimental groups. It was a 2(exclusion type: the ignored vs. the rejected) x 3(power type: the high vs. the low vs. the medium) x 2(exclusion situation: the recall vs. the real) between-group design experiment.The subjects operated test of power’s priming after social exclusion task.The results showed that, for the explicit self-focused attention, the main effect of social exclusion and power was significant and the interaction was also significant. Under the ignored condition, high power individuals’ self-focused attention was lower than medium and low power individuals. For the implicit self-focused attention, the main effect of social exclusion and power was significant, and the ignored had higher self-focused attention than who were rejected; high power had lower self-focused attention than who had medium and low power, but there was no the interaction. We conclude that power mediates the relationship between ignored social exclusion and explicit self-focused attention.