The Effects Of Social Rejection On Psychological Responses: The Moderating Effect Of Rejection Sensitivity

The rejection from important others and social groups has great impact onpeople’s emotion and behaviors as rejection could increase people’s hostile feelingsand responsible aggression to others. However, not everyone holds same intensity ofreaction with the consideration that someone could interpret and handle the socialevents from a positive perspective and enjoy a harmonious relationship with others inreturn while others could recognize rejection from others’ ambiguous behaviors andhave excessive emotion and behavior reaction and do harm to their interpersonalrelation. We name the latter one as high rejection sensitivity individuals. Most of theformer researches explored the relation between rejection sensitivity and poorpsychological-social adaptive function of the individuals, such as the relation betweenrejection sensitivity and anxiety, depression, aggression and violent behavior of theindividuals who are in a romance. However, there are less researches focus on howthe emotion and reactive behavior of the high rejection sensitivity individuals couldbe affected by social rejection. This study explores how social rejection affectsindividuals’ psychological response and its mechanism; the moderating effect of therejection sensitivity on social rejection’s effect on individual’s psychological responseis further discussed.This study analyzed the relation between rejection sensitivity and individuals’psychological and interpersonal function with questionnaires and situation simulationin the lab. The first study explores the effect of different social rejections on highrejection sensitivity individuals’ cognitive evaluation, emotion response and behaviordisposition; the second study further explore the attention biases of high rejectionsensitivity individuals when they accept different social rejections. Conclusions are asfollows:(1) Definite social rejection would lead to lower positive cognitive evaluation,higher negative cognitive evaluation, more negative emotion and less desire to social communication;(2) Rejection sensitivity exerts moderating effect when definiterejection affect individuals’ positive evaluation to themselves and negative emotion.When suffering with definite rejection, higher rejection sensitivity, lower positivecognitive evaluation and higher negative emotion.(3) Rejection sensitivity exertsmoderating effect when undefined rejection affect individuals’ positive evaluation tothemselves and negative emotion; after suffering from undefined rejection, higherrejection sensitivity, less positive evaluation to others and higher negative emotion.(4)High rejection sensitivity individuals have significantly less desire for socialcommunication than the low ones on both the social rejection and general situations.(5) The individuals have attention bias to threatening clues on both the social rejectionand general situations with the difficulty on transferring attention from threateningclues.(6) Rejection sensitivity exerts moderating effect when undefined rejectionaffect individuals’ attention bias to threatening clues; in the situation of undefinedrejection, high rejection sensitivity individuals are more sensitive to threatening clues.(7) Rejection sensitivity doesn’t exert moderating effect when definite rejection affectindividuals’ attention bias to threatening clues; after suffering from definite rejection,no difference could be found between high and low rejection sensitivity individuals’attention processing on threatening clues.