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Rejection sensitivity is a tendency for individuals to expect anxiety, readiness, and overreaction to rejection. In daily life, when people are rejected by others, different people often have different degrees of response to the rejection.Some people may understand and handle such events well; while others may have excessive emotions in rejecting others. And behavioral responses, and even perceived the ambiguous behavior of others as rejection, which affects interpersonal communication. This difference is sensitive to rejection.
- Chinese name
- Rejection sensitive
- Foreign name
- rejection sensitivity / RS
- Applied discipline
- psychology
- Rejection sensitivity is a tendency for individuals to expect anxiety, readiness, and overreaction to rejection. In daily life, when people are rejected by others, different people often have different degrees of response to the rejection.Some people may understand and handle such events well; while others may have excessive emotions in rejecting others. And behavioral responses, and even perceived the ambiguous behavior of others as rejection, which affects interpersonal communication. This difference is sensitive to rejection.
Rejection of Sensitive Definition
- In the field of psychology, rejection sensitivity was first proposed by Mehrabian (1970). He believes that rejection sensitivity is based on the negative expectations of social relations, that is, the fear and fear of rejection, discomfort and painful encounters that will occur in interpersonal communication. Downey and Feldman (1996), after a lot of meticulous research, defined rejection sensitivity as a tendency to anxious expectations of rejection, preparatory perception and overreaction. Rejection sensitivity and insecure attachment have similar performance in interpersonal relationships, but compared with insecure attachment, rejection sensitivity is mainly reflected in the specific social context that affects the differences in cognitive and emotional processes of individuals in interpersonal communication behaviors . Rejection sensitivity is also considered as a more detailed depiction of the nature of the cognitive and emotional subprocesses of attachment's internal working model (Pietrzak, Downey, & Ayduk, 2005). Attachment focuses on internalized representations and rejects sensitive concerns It is the individual's evaluation of the situation, the intentions and behaviors of others, and the individual's response. Rejection sensitivity is considered as a personality trait, and the personality, thought, emotion, and behavior characteristics of this personality trait are particularly obvious in certain situations.Therefore, when an individual is rejected in a situation that may be rejected by an important person, Sensitive individual differences will be highlighted.
Rejection Sensitive Mechanism: Social Cognitive Model
- Downey and Feldman (1996) first constructed a rejection-sensitive social cognitive model to describe the impact of rejection of others in social contexts on the individual's cognition, emotions, and behaviors. These cognitions and emotions are important for individual self- and interpersonal adjustment. Meaning. Influenced by the theory of interpersonal relationships and attachment theory about personality, Romero-Canyas et al. Further improved the social model of rejection sensitivity to reveal the cognitive mechanism of rejection sensitivity. They develop an anxious expectation that others will reject themselves. This model is shown in Figure 1: First, people will learn to reject direct connections to specific contextual cues, and these cues will trigger anxious expectations of rejection. Individuals with high rejection sensitivity will pay special attention to social threat cues. The response threshold to these clues is also relatively low, and it will have a stronger emotional response to rejection. This reactive tendency is thought to lead to more pronounced anger and reactive attacks, which in turn may generate a kind of feedback on the counterparty, forming self-evident prophecies. A study by Downey, Freitas, Michaelis, and Khouri (1998) found that one of the couples with a high degree of rejection sensitivity had three times as many broken relationship relationships within one year as those without a rejection sensitivity. They believe that high-sensitivity individuals will over-adjust their relationships in order to maintain their original relationship and prevent rejection. These excessive behaviors in turn aggravate the rejection of the partner, which is not conducive to the development of intimate relationships, which in turn induces anxiety and insecurity, and leads to a vicious circle of love relationships. Finally, the two parties have to break up.
- In the social cognitive model, the anxiety expectation of rejection is regarded as the core component of the sensitive cognitive mechanism of rejection. Experiences such as domestic violence, emotional neglect, strict discipline, and conditional love of parents will all produce anxious expectations of rejection. People who have anxious expectations of rejection will be more likely to perceive other people's relatively vague negative behaviors (such as when intimate partners show apathy and distance) as rejections, which will affect their relationships.
Rejection of sensitivity
- The formation of rejection sensitivity has an important relationship with early growth experience, and early trauma has a significant positive correlation with rejection sensitivity (Mellin, 2012). The brain area activated by traumatic experience is more consistent with the brain area that is sensitive to rejection. Studies by Zhang Jingna and others have shown that the SFG patients have lower FA values in the right SFG compared with those without stress, and have bilateral midfrontal, The MD values of the cingulate gyrus and the left amygdala, brain island, and pale globules were significantly increased. Studies of rejection sensitivity have shown that individuals with high rejection sensitivity have higher levels of activation in these brain regions. At present, scholars at home and abroad have conducted a lot of development research on peer acceptance and peer rejection. These studies have found that peer acceptance and rejection have important effects on individual emotions, social behaviors and interpersonal relationships. Among them, rejection sensitivity may be an important mediating or regulating variable. Researchers need to explore the relationship between early traumatic experience and rejection sensitivity and the relationship between peer sensitivity and rejecting sensitivity in the influence of peer relationships on interpersonal relationships. In particular, follow-up research is conducted on children who have been rejected and neglected to create an accepted educational environment for them, and explore the developmental changes in this environment's sensitivity to rejection and interpersonal interaction patterns. In addition, the development and changes of adolescents 'sensitivity to rejection also need to be further explored.The adolescent stage is a period when individuals are very sensitive to peer relationships. The acceptance or rejection of peers has a direct impact on adolescents' self-esteem, sense of belonging, control, and presence. Therefore, adolescents are more sensitive to rejection than individuals of other ages, and some studies have confirmed that adolescents are more sensitive to rejection than children and adults. Sebastian et al. Studied the brain mechanism of this difference between adolescents and adults in the face of peer rejection, and they found that adolescents are still in the process of continuous maturation in the brain areas of emotional control and self-evaluation, and the emotional circuit Functional development affects their sensitivity to rejection, and the regulation of adult brain activity can be based on attention needs, while the regulation of adolescent activity depends more on the emotional characteristics of the stimulus. These developmental differences also make teenagers face to face. Poor emotion control during rejection, showing higher sensitivity to rejection.
Reject Sensitive Improvement
- Existing research shows that rejection sensitivity often has a negative impact on interpersonal relationships. Therefore, how to alleviate the sensitivity of people with high rejection sensitivity in order to improve their interpersonal relationship is an issue that needs further exploration. Past research shows that people with high rejection sensitivity often lack the skills of emotional regulation, so helping them learn to re-evaluate the rejection situation will help improve their sensitivity, for example, by training them to allocate attention and control the focus of attention, Convert the meaning of stimulus from sorrow to neutral or even happy, so that they transcend the habitual response of the situation, and prevent the highly rejected sensitive individuals from automatically rejecting-hostile links when processing social rejection clues, thereby effectively buffering the high rejection sensitivity The negative reactions. People with high rejection sensitivity often form rejected self-proven prophecies in interpersonal communication due to negative expectations. Therefore, if they are trained to have more self-affirmation and receive positive feedback in interpersonal interaction, forming a positive cycle will help improve their interpersonal relationship status. Some studies have also confirmed that self-affirmation training can effectively improve rejection sensitivity and have a longer-lasting effect.People who show high rejection sensitivity can improve their sense of security by performing self-affirmation exercises and perform better in interpersonal communication. Relax and be positive. Therefore, self-affirmation and positive feedback have a positive effect on rejection sensitivity, especially in intimate relationships. A partner's more understanding and support can increase the positive emotions of a person who is sensitive to rejection. This support relationship can reduce the anxiety expectation of rejection. That is, by creating a healthy, happy relationship, you can effectively reduce rejection sensitivity. [1]