People who are highly concerned about the potential for receiving negative social feedback appear to be particularly fond of communicating with their close ties via technology-mediated channels, according to new research published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. The findings shed light on how rejection sensitivity interacts with factors such as perceived closeness to shape the quality daily social interactions.
“I became interested in this topic after thinking through the combination of two established areas of psychological research: (1) the effects of social rejection and (2) the effects of personality on social interactions,” explained study author Joseph B. Bayer, an assistant professor at Ohio State University.
“These two areas have tended to be studied separately in the past. Yet we became interested in whether people who tend to worry about rejection — i.e., those with high rejection sensitivity — end up with a distinctive set of social interactions in their daily lives. And this is important because we know that having supportive, satisfying daily interactions is vital to personal well-being over the long-term.”
In the study, 108 undergraduates at a large university in the Midwestern United States completed the Sensitivity to Rejection Scale, which asked the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “I sometimes prefer being with strangers than with familiar people” and “I try to feel a group out before I take a definite stand on a controversial issue.” For the next two weeks, the participants received six surveys every day that collected a variety of information about their recent social interactions.
In line with previous research, Bayer and his colleagues found that social interactions with close others tended to be more enjoyable and supportive than social interactions with distant others. Importantly, rejection sensitivity appeared to influence the relationship between closeness and interaction quality. Those high in rejection sensitivity found social interactions with distant others to be less enjoyable and supportive compared to those low on rejection sensitivity. At the same time, those high in rejection sensitivity found interactions with close others to be more enjoyable than people with lower rejection sensitivity, particularly when communicating via technologies such as texting or Facebook Messenger.
Contrary to their expectations, the researchers found that those high in rejection sensitivity were not more likely to perceive their daily social interactions in a more negative light. Instead, the heightened enjoyment with close others and reduced enjoyment with distant others appeared to cancel out each other.
“There are two key things that the average person should take away,” Bayer explained to PsyPost. “First, how rejection sensitivity shapes daily interactions will depend on both the specific type of relationship partner (close vs. distant tie) and interaction channel (face-to-face vs. online). Second, close relationships may matter more to high rejection-sensitive people in terms of their daily well-being. We found that the people who worry the most about rejection also seem to appreciate interacting with their close ties the most (vs. low rejection-sensitive people) — but only when communicating through social technologies.”
But the study, like all research, includes some limitations. Bayer outlined two primary caveats: “First, our measurement of communication channel, which focused on comparing face-to-face with any form of technology-mediated interaction, does not account for the many differences in online environments (which is the focus of other research we do). Second, larger, pre-registered follow-up studies will be needed to replicate our effects across more diverse samples to ensure the observed findings hold up in non-student populations over time.”
“Our study echoes a couple of important trends that are occurring more broadly in the social sciences,” Bayer added. “We see the need to account for situational factors (e.g., the type of relationship/environment matters) to understand the psychology of real-world social cognition and interaction. We also see the need to focus on variability in effects, not just differences in average interaction quality.”
“In our study, when using communication technologies, rejection-sensitive people reported both the most satisfying close-tie interactions and least rewarding distant-tie interactions concurrently. As our window into real-world behavior continues to widen, these broader trends are becoming increasingly necessary to get a clearer picture of human behavior.”
The study, “Rejection sensitivity and interaction quality in everyday life“, was authored by Joseph B. Bayer, Penny Trieu, Nicole Ellison, Sarita Y. Schoenebeck, and Emily B. Falk.
