The Study On Negative Effect Of Social Rejection Content On Emotion

The need to belong is one of the basic need for human beings,which drives people to establish friendly and stable relationship with others and groups.There is no doubt that social rejection can have negative effects on individuals as a major threat to the need to belong.Researches find that when people are rejected,they experience decreased feelings of belonging,control,self-esteem,and some else positive emotion,and increased negative emotion,such as anger,sadness,hurt feeling.Social rejection can occur for several reasons,in several forms and contexts,that have different on individuals.One study has found that individuals' cognition on the reasons for social rejection can have different influence on emotions even in an ambitious rejection context.When considering the reasons for rejection,it can be integrated into two aspects,that is warmth and competence;and from the generation and social function of emotions,anger and sad may have their own characteristics on the two basic dimensions of warmth and competence.The content of social cognition can be differentiated into two fundamental dimensions:warmth and competence.Warmth refers to the characteristics which involve forming warm,friendly social relationship and moral judgment.Competence refers to characteristics which involve express oneself and pursuing achievement goal.In addition,the impact of social rejection content on negative emotions could be moderated by other factor,for instance,individual differences and situation factor.Rejection sensitivity is a personality trait characterized by anxiously expect,readily perceive,and overact to ambiguous or overt interpersonal rejection.Rejection sensitivity may restrict the impact of social rejection content on negative emotions.This study focuses on the differences of emotions evoked by the content of social rejection through two study,and explores the possible effect of rejection sensitivity.In the first study,adopting recall paradigm to investigate the emotion differences that the lack of warmth rejections and the lack of competence rejections the people experienced.The results show that(1)Among the emotions evoked by the social rejection content,sad is the dominant emotion.(2)There is no difference between lack of warmth and lack of competence on sad,anger,hurt feeling and happy.(3)Compared to individuals with low rejection sensitivity,people with high rejection sensitivity experience higher level of negative emotions and lower level of positive emotion.It may have been involved other factors when the participants recall the experience of rejection in the past,such as counterfactual thinking,the time distance and the importance of the incidents.In the second experiment,we use the get-acquainted paradigm which makes participants have no time to explain the event,and cope with rejections from the same-sex strangers.In the second study,adopting the adapted get-acquainted paradigm to investigate the emotion differences that the warmth rejection reasons and the competence rejection reasons the people experienced immediately.The results show that(1)Among the emotions evoked by the social rejection content,sad is the dominant emotion.(2)There is no difference between lack of warmth and lack of competence on sad and hurt feeling.(3)Anger induced by lack of competence rejection is higher than lack of warmth rejection,and happy induced by lack of competence rejection is lower than lack of warmth rejection.(4)Compared to individuals with low rejection sensitivity,people with high rejection sensitivity experience higher level of negative emotions and lower level of positive emotion,and people with high rejection sensitivity in competence rejection reasons group experience higher level of anger.Above all,the negative effects on emotions induced by social rejection characterized with warmth and competence is as follows:(1)The content of social rejection can evoke anger,sadness,hurt feeling and happiness in parallel,among those negative emotions,sadness is dominant emotion.(2)Anger induced by lack of competence rejection is higher than lack of warmth rejection.(3)The content of social rejection can decrease the level of happiness,and coping with immediate social rejection,happiness induced by lack of competence rejection is lower than lack of warmth rejection.(4)People with high rejection sensitivity experience higher level of negative emotions and lower level of positive emotion,and people with high rejection sensitivity in competence rejection reasons group experience higher level of sad and lower happy.