The neuroscience of rejection: The surprising way your brain learns from being left out

Imagine finding out your friends hosted a dinner party and didn’t invite you, or that you were passed over for a job you were excited about. These moments hurt, and people often describe rejection in the language of physical pain.

While rejection can be emotionally painful, it can also teach us something.

I am a social psychology researcher, and research my colleagues and I have conducted shows that rejection can serve as a learning signal – shaping how people navigate relationships and decide whom to attempt to connect with in the future.

What’s known about social rejection

Researchers have long recognized the emotional toll of social rejection. Studies show that experiences of rejection trigger distress, increase levels of the stress hormone cortisol, reduce sense of belonging and can even lead to increased aggression. In the long run, chronic feelings of rejection can harm mental and physical health.

But why does being excluded hurt so much? From an evolutionary standpoint, our brains likely evolved to treat social rejection as a threat. For our ancestors, losing social bonds meant losing access to protection, resources, and cooperation – making social connection and belonging a fundamental human need. In other words, rejection hurts to alert you that your welfare is in danger.

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Early neuroscience studies seemed to support this idea. When people were left out of a simple virtual ball-tossing game, their brain activity mirrored the response to physical pain, showing activation of a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex.

Later studies suggested a different explanation: Perhaps it wasn’t just the pain of rejection that triggered this brain activity, but also the surprise of it. In this view, the brain responded differently to negative feedback and unexpected feedback. What might your brain do with this unexpected feedback?

Social lives aren’t defined by isolated moments of rejection. You learn through interactions: You get to know people, read their intentions, revise your assumptions and try to make sense of mixed signals. People might turn you down for all sorts of reasons – some understandable, others harder to accept. You then reflect on what these experiences mean, adjust your behavior, and if you cross paths with them again, you get another chance to decide how you want to engage.

This is where our research takes a next step: We examine how people learn from social rejection and acceptance over time and how they use these past experiences to build future connections, deciding on whom to invest in building relationships with and whom to let go.

Rejection as an experience to learn from

My colleagues and I designed a dynamic experiment that mimics the structure of real social decisions. Using behavioral tests, brain imaging and computational modeling, we studied how people learn from repeated social feedback.

Our college-aged participants played a multi-round economic game while undergoing brain scans. First, they created personal profiles for themselves answering questions about times they were honest and trustworthy, and were told that other players would read these profiles to get to know them better. These other players, who assumed the role of “Deciders,” would then rank participants – “Responders” – in the order they wanted to play with them.

In each round, Responders were either accepted or rejected by Deciders. This depended on two things: how highly they had been ranked and how many slots the computer had allowed for that round. In reality, Responders weren’t paired with real people; the Deciders’ rankings and number of slots were generated by the computer.

Participants could receive a high rank but still get rejected if there were not enough slots. That scenario is like not receiving an invitation to a wedding due to a very tight budget – the outcome is disappointing but understandable because you know you were excluded due to circumstances and that your friend still values you. Or participants could receive a poor rank but still get accepted if there were a lot of slots. This would be similar to being picked last for a team – still getting a chance to play despite knowing you were not as desired.

This unique design allowed us to tease apart how people learn from two types of feedback. When you’re accepted, your brain notes that feeling included results in a rewarding experience. Your brain also calculates relational value, which indicates how much you think others value you. In the case of our study, relational value was indicated by how highly Responders were ranked by the Decider.

If accepted by a Decider, Responders would receive a pot of money that would triple. Responders would then get to decide whether to give half of the tripled amount back to the Decider or keep all to themselves, putting trust and reciprocity to test.

We found that Responders were more likely to choose Deciders who had accepted them and rated them highly, learning from both kinds of feedback. With neuroimaging, we identified that these learning mechanisms were distinctly tracked by different regions in the brain.

Brain areas that researchers previously found to be active in social rejection studies, like the anterior cingulate cortex, were also activated when participants received feedback about how much they were valued. Interestingly, this activity didn’t just reflect pain or surprise; it reflected a recalibration of their perceived social worth, as this brain activity occurred when participants changed their beliefs about how others rank them.

At the same time, experiences of acceptance were linked with activity in the ventral striatum – a region well known for processing financial and social rewards, such as money, praise or smiles.

Together, these findings suggest that the brain is doing more than reacting to rejection or reward – it’s in fact learning from it. Each social interaction helps people update internal models of who values them and who doesn’t, shaping future decisions about whom to trust, approach or avoid.

Building stronger connections

When it comes to social relationships, the two learning systems we studied here – how people respond to rewards and how they track relational value – serve an important role in interpreting social interactions and adjusting behavior. To maintain healthy relationships, you need to disentangle social rewards from how much you think others value you.

You sometimes need to recognize that your friend still values you even if they might disappoint you, like missing a birthday party for a valid reason. Without this kind of understanding, relationships can become unstable.

In fact, some mental health conditions reflect problems in these very processes. For example, borderline personality disorder is often marked by volatile relationships and intense reactions to both kindness and perceived slights.

At the same time, being attuned to social rewards – in the form of smiles, compliments or invites – can encourage you to seek out such connections and strengthen your existing bonds. Other forms of mental health conditions like depression are often associated with social withdrawal and reduced sensitivity to such positive social rewards.

By unpacking how people learn from acceptance and rejection, our study offers a foundation to better understand both healthy social behavior and the struggle to connect.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.