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Social rejection

Social rejection occurs when an individual is deliberately excluded from a social relationship or social interaction. The topic includes interpersonal rejection (or peer rejection), romantic rejection and familial estrangement. A person can be rejected or shunned by individuals or an entire group of people. Furthermore, rejection can be either active, by bullying, teasing, or ridiculing, or passive, by ignoring a person, or giving the "silent treatment". The experience of being rejected is subjective for the recipient, and it can be perceived when it is not actually present. The word "ostracism" is also commonly used to denote a process of social exclusion (in Ancient Greece, ostracism was a form of temporary banishment following a people's vote).[2]5

Although humans are social beings, some level of rejection is an inevitable part of life. Nevertheless, rejection can become a problem when it is prolonged or consistent, when the relationship is important, or when the individual is highly sensitive to rejection. Rejection by an entire group of people can have especially negative effects, particularly when it results in social isolation.[3] The experience of rejection can lead to a number of adverse psychological consequences such as loneliness, low self-esteem, aggression, and depression.[4] It can also lead to feelings of insecurity and a heightened sensitivity to future rejection.[5][citation needed]

Need for acceptance

Social rejection may be emotionally painful, due to the social nature of human beings, as well as the essential need for social interaction between other humans. Abraham Maslow and other theorists have suggested that the need for love and belongingness is a fundamental human motivation.[6] According to Maslow, all humans, even introverts, need to be able to give and receive affection to be psychologically healthy.

Psychologists believe that simple contact or social interaction with others is not enough to fulfill this need. Instead, people have a strong motivational drive to form and maintain caring interpersonal relationships. People need both stable relationships and satisfying interactions with the people in those relationships. If either of these two ingredients is missing, people will begin to feel lonely and unhappy.[7] Thus, rejection is a significant threat. In fact, the majority of human anxieties appear to reflect concerns over social exclusion.[8]

Being a member of a group is also important for social identity, which is a key component of the self-concept. Mark Leary of Duke University has suggested that the main purpose of self-esteem is to monitor social relations and detect social rejection. In this view, self-esteem is a sociometer which activates negative emotions when signs of exclusion appear.[9]Social psychological research confirms the motivational basis of the need for acceptance. Specifically, fear of rejection leads to conformity to peer pressure (sometimes called normative influence), and compliance to the demands of others. The need for affiliation and social interaction appears to be particularly strong under stress.[citation needed]

Psychology of ostracism

Most of the research on the psychology of ostracism has been conducted by the social psychologist Kip Williams. He and his colleagues have devised a model of ostracism which provides a framework to show the complexity in the varieties of ostracism and the processes of its effects. There he theorises that ostracism can potentially be so harmful that humans have evolved an efficient warning system to immediately detect and respond to it.[35][36]. In the animal kingdom as well as in primitive human societies, ostracism can lead to death due to the lack of protection benefits and access to sufficient food resources from the group.[37] Living apart from the whole of society also means not having a mate, so being able to detect ostracism would be a highly adaptive response to ensure survival and continuation of the genetic line.

Temporal Need-Threat Model[edit]

The predominant theoretical model of social rejection is the temporal-need threat model proposed by Williams and his colleagues,[38] in which the process of social exclusion is divided into three stages: reflexive, reflective, and resignation.[39] The reflexive stage happens when social rejection first occurs. It is an immediate effect happened on individuals. Then, the reflective stage enters when the individual starts to reflect and cope with social rejection. Finally, if the rejection last for the long term and the individual cannot successfully cope with it, the social rejection would turn to the resignation stage, where the individual is likely to suffer from severe depression and helplessness. These will likely push the individual into suicide or other extreme behaviour.

Reflexive Stage[edit]

The reflexive stage is the first stage of social rejection and refers to the period immediately after social exclusion has occurred. During this stage, Williams proposed that ostracism uniquely poses a threat to four fundamental human needs;[39] the need to belong, the need for control in social situations, the need to maintain high levels of self-esteem, and the need to have a sense of a meaningful existence.[35] When social rejection is related to the individual's social relationships, the individual's need for belonging and self-esteem is threatened; when it is not associated with it, it is primarily a threat to a sense of control and meaningful existence. Another challenge that individuals need to face at this stage is the sense of pain. Previous scholars have used neurobiological methods to find that social exclusion, whether intentional or unintentional, evokes pain in individuals.[40] Specifically, neurobiological evidence suggests that social exclusion increases the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) activation.[41] This brain region, in turn, is associated with physiological pain in individuals. Notably, the right ventral prefrontal cortex (RVPFC) is also further activated when individuals find that social rejection is intentional;[41] this brain region is associated with the regulation of pain perception, implying that pain perception decreases when individuals understand the source of this social rejection. Further research suggests that personal traits or environmental factors do not affect this pain. Thus, people are motivated to remove this pain with behaviours aimed at reducing the likelihood of others ostracising them any further and increasing their inclusionary status.

Reflective Stage[edit]

In the reflective stage, individuals begin to think about and try to cope with social rejection. In the need-treat model, their response is referred to as need fortification, i.e. the creation of interventions that respond to the needs they are threatened by in the reflective stage. Specifically, when individuals' self-esteem and sense of belonging are threatened, they will try to integrate more into the group. As a result, these rejected individuals develop more pro-social behaviours, such as helping others and giving gifts. In contrast, when their sense of control and meaning is threatened, they show more antisocial behaviour, such as verbal abuse, fighting, etc., to prove they are essential.[40]

Resignation Stage[edit]

When individuals have been in social rejection for a long time and cannot improve their situation through effective coping, they move to the third stage, resignation, in which they do not try to change the problem they are facing but choose to accept it. In Zadro's interview study, in which she interviewed 28 respondents in a state of chronic rejection, she found that the respondents were depressed, self-deprecating and helpless.[42][40] This social rejection can significantly impact the physical and psychological health of the individual.[43]

Controversy[edit]

The controversy over temporal need-threat model has focused on whether it enhances or reduces people's perception of pain. DeWall and Baumeister's research suggests that individuals experience a reduction in pain after rejection, a phenomenon they refer to as emotional numbness, which contradicts Williams et al.'s theory that social rejection enhances pain perception.[44] In this regard, Williams suggests that this phenomenon is likely due to differences in the paradigm used in the study, as when using a long-term paradigm such as Life-Alone, individuals do not feel the possibility of rejoining the group, thus creating emotional numbness.[40] This is further supported by Bernstein and Claypool, who found that in separate cyberball and life-alone experiments, stronger stimuli of rejection, such as life-alone, protected people through emotional numbness. In contrast, in the case of minor rejection, such as that in cyberball, the individual's system detects the rejection cue and draws attention to it through a sense of pain.[45]

Popularity resurgence[edit]

There has been recent research into the function of popularity on development, specifically how a transition from ostracization to popularity can potentially reverse the deleterious effects of being socially ostracized. While various theories have been put forth regarding what skills or attributes confer an advantage at obtaining popularity, it appears that individuals who were once popular and subsequently experienced a transient ostracization are often able to employ the same skills that led to their initial popularity to bring about a popularity resurgence.[46]

Romantic[edit]

In contrast to the study of childhood rejection, which primarily examines rejection by a group of peers, some researchers focus on the phenomenon of a single individual rejecting another in the context of a romantic relationship. In both teenagers and adults, romantic rejection occurs when a person refuses the romantic advances of another, ignores/avoids or is repulsed by someone who is romantically interested in them, or unilyaterall ends an existing relationship. The state of unrequited love is a common experience in youth, but mutual love becomes more typical as people get older.[47] Romantic rejection is a painful, emotional experience that appears to trigger a response in the caudate nucleus of the brain, and associated dopamine and cortisol activity.[48] Subjectively, rejected individuals experience a range of negative emotions, including frustration, intense anger, jealousy, hate, and eventually, resignation, despair, and possible long-term depression. However, there have been cases where individuals go back and forth between depression and anger.

Rejection sensitivity[edit]

Karen Horney was the first theorist to discuss the phenomenon of rejection sensitivity.[49] She suggested that it is a component of the neurotic personality, and that it is a tendency to feel deep anxiety and humiliation at the slightest rebuff. Simply being made to wait, for example, could be viewed as a rejection and met with extreme anger and hostility.[50] Albert Mehrabian developed an early questionnaire measure of rejection sensitivity.[51] Mehrabian suggested that sensitive individuals are reluctant to express opinions, tend to avoid arguments or controversial discussions, are reluctant to make requests or impose on others, are easily hurt by negative feedback from others, and tend to rely too much on familiar others and situations so as to avoid rejection.

A more recent (1996) definition of rejection sensitivity is the tendency to "anxiously expect, readily perceive, and overreact" to social rejection.[52] People differ in their readiness to perceive and react to rejection.[52] The causes of individual differences in rejection sensitivity are not well understood. Because of the association between rejection sensitivity and neuroticism, there is a likely genetic predisposition.[53] Rejection sensitive dysphoria is also a common symptom of ADHD.[54][unreliable source?] Others posit that rejection sensitivity stems from early attachment relationships and parental rejection;[53] also peer rejection is thought to play a role.[53][55] Bullying, an extreme form of peer rejection, is likely connected to later rejection sensitivity.[53] However, there is no conclusive evidence for any of these theories.[53]

Health[edit]

Social rejection has a large effect on a person's health. Baumeister and Leary originally suggested that an unsatisfied need to belong would inevitably lead to problems in behavior as well as mental and physical health.[7] Corroboration of these assumptions about behavior deficits were seen by John Bowlby in his research.[56] Numerous studies have found that being socially rejected leads to an increase in levels of anxiety.[57][58][59][60] Additionally, the level of depression a person feels as well as the amount they care about their social relationships is directly proportional to the level of rejection they perceive.[60] Rejection affects the emotional health and well being of a person as well. Overall, experiments show that those who have been rejected will suffer from more negative emotions and have fewer positive emotions than those who have been accepted or those who were in neutral or control conditions.[61]

In addition to the emotional response to rejection, there is a large effect on physical health as well. Having poor relationships and being more frequently rejected is predictive of mortality.[62] Also, as long as a decade after the marriage ends, divorced women have higher rates of illness than their non-married or currently married counterparts.[63] In the case of a family estrangement, a core part of the mother's identity may be betrayed by the rejection of an adult child.[64] The chance for reconciliation, however slight, results in an inability to attain closure.[65] The resulting emotional state and societal stigma from the estrangement may harm psychological and physical health of the parent through end of life.[66][67][68] The immune system tends to be harmed when a person experiences social rejection.[69][70] This can cause severe problems for those with diseases such as HIV. One study by Cole, Kemeny, and Taylor investigated the differences in the disease progression of HIV positive gay men who were sensitive to rejection compared to those who were not considered rejection sensitive.[70] The study, which took place over nine years, indicated significantly faster rate of low T helper cells, therefore leading to an earlier AIDS diagnosis. They also found that those patients who were more sensitive to rejection died from the disease an average of 2 years earlier than their non-rejection sensitive counterparts.[70] Other aspects of health are also affected by rejection. Both systolic and diastolic blood pressure increase upon imagining a rejection scenario.[71] Those who are socially rejected have an increased likelihood of suffering from tuberculosis, as well as suicide.[72] Rejection and isolation were found to affect levels of pain following an operation[73] as well as other physical forms of pain.[59] Social rejection may cause a reduction in intelligence.[74] MacDonald and Leary theorize that rejection and exclusion cause physical pain because that pain is a warning sign to support human survival. As humans developed into social creatures, social interactions and relationships became necessary for survival, and the physical pain systems already existed within the human body.[75]