The priority maps framework proposes that attentional priorities are weighted in cognitive/brain maps of the external space. As extensions of saliency maps, a variety of factors known as “attentional signals” would be represented in these so-called priority maps, ranging from low-level features such as physical salience to higher-level features such as social information. According to studies investigating attentional patterns in the presence of social signals, social attentional signals (e.g. faces) would “automatically” overcome the presence of any other signal and win the competition for attentional resources in virtually any situation, in the absence of any strong gating effect of goal-related signals. We challenge this view. Indeed, in social pain research, there is indirect evidence that the feeling of social pain regarding a social exclusion situation affects the visual exploratory patterns toward social stimuli. Here, we performed an eye-tracking study of gaze patterns during the Cyberball task, a virtual ball-tossing task during which in the first part of the task the participant and the fictitious task partners receive the ball equally, while the participant no longer receives the ball in the second part of the task. We correlated the proportion of gazes towards the fictitious partners’ faces to questionnaire scores of social pain feelings reported shortly after the game. Results show moderate evidence that attention to faces and feelings of social pain are correlated. We discuss these results in light of the priority maps framework with a focus on theoretical accounts assessing attentional patterns during social exclusion.