Essay On Rejection Sensitivity

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THE PROBLEM AND ITS BACKGROUND Introduction Rejection is a fact of life. It is a basic aspect that individuals are constantly engaging within their everyday existence. Throughout years, men experience thousands of social exclusion, which can be a form of rejection (Williams, 2010). Some people might be taking it on a positive way while others might develop maladaptive behaviors like aggression or withdrawal which may result to extreme sadness and distress associated to depression because of rejection. The negative effects of this are also linked to how an individual perceived and react to it, which is termed as rejection sensitivity. The concept of sensitivity to rejection was pioneered by Mehrabian (1970). He studied the concept both empirically and conceptually to classify rejection sensitivity from affiliative need (Mehrabian, 1976). Rejection sensitivity (RS) is defined by Zimmer-Gembeck and Nesdale (2012) as “a tendency to expect, perceive, and over react to rejection”. This concept was conceptualized as a defensive motivational system that integrates the perceptual and social information processing of an individual (Pietrzck, Downey, & Ayduk, 2005). The idea of acceptance-rejection is important reflection of individual …show more content…

Individuals used other people’s cues on certain situations that lead them to anxiously expect rejection. For those individuals with higher rejection sensitivity levels, the fear of being rejected or expectations of abandonment may have damaging upshot on interpersonal functioning of an individual. Having high rejection sensitivity levels may cause behaviors that might push others to actually reject a rejection sensitive individual (Downey et al., 1998). Individuals that are rejection sensitive have the feelings of insecurity, anxiousness, misapprehension of social cues that result to rejection of others into