However subtle these background influences are, they all rub up against a stark fact: Our rejection radar is just not adapted to a world in which we're thrown against new and often strange situations daily. If the corner fruit vendor ignores your cheery "good morning!" it doesn't mean he won't sell you an apple; if your coworkers forget to invite you to after-work drinks, you're not necessarily the office pariah. Still, Leary says that he would rather err on the side of over-reading signals of rejection. Imagine if you had no pain receptors to warn you of impending bodily harm—you wouldn't feel scrapes or punches, but you wouldn't survive long, either.
From Fear to Eternity
When starting out as a psychologist, Geraldine Downey, now a professor at Columbia University, sought to discover how children whose early years were marked by parental rejection fared in adult relationships. She hypothesized that those whose needs for care and attachment were repeatedly met with rejection would likely grow up to anticipate it, see it where it might not exist, and overreact to it, as if life itself were on the line. After more than a decade of research, she has unveiled a fairly detailed portrait of people who are highly sensitive to rejection.
Awash in anticipatory anxiety or pre-emptive anger, they expect to be rejected by those they grow to value. They interpret neutral or negligent actions (a delay in phoning, say) as intentional slights. They are primed to find firm evidence of whatever feels threatening to them, cognitively poised to interpret situations negatively. They don't give anyone the benefit of a doubt. Women are no more likely than men to be overly rejection-sensitive, but gender does influence the way they react to imagined or actual slights: Men express more jealousy, women become more hostile and unsupportive. To ferret out a person's expectations of rejection, Downey asks questions such as:If you must approach your family for a loan, how anxious would you be? Would you expect them to help you?
Through a set of ingenious studies, Downey has discovered that, just as we have a nervous system that makes us reflexively recoil in self-protection when we spot a snake, we also have a defensive system that tries to protect us from rejection. Automatically triggered by the merest hint of rebuff, it throws our body into physiologic alarm mode, riveting our attention on the need to do something fast and urging us to head off an impending relationship rupture.
Improbably, the finding owes something to artists Edward Hopper and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Hopper's scenes of urban desolation, Downey observed, are generally perceived as depictions of rejection, while Renoir's soft scenes come across as acceptance. After showing images of paintings by both artists to subjects in her study, she startled them with a loud noise. And then, via eyelid sensors, she counted their eye blinks.
Indeed, those who were highly rejection-sensitive reacted to the Hopper paintings, but not the Renoirs, with an amplified eye blink when startled by the noise—a sign that their bodies and minds had been pitched into panic. The threat of social rejection exaggerated their physiological response. By contrast, those low in rejection-sensitivity reacted equally to the noise whether viewing Hopper or Renoir scenes.
Although the defensive system is designed to motivate relationship repair, it backfires on those who are highly rejection-sensitive. They live life in panic mode, which not only brings them relentless emotional turmoil, but also sets off the most frustrating feature of rejection-sensitivity: It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Magnifying oversights and seeing slipups as proof of catastrophe, they unleash hostility, anger, despondency, or jealousy. Their emotional storms often drive away the very people they hoped to hook.
"It happens in all contexts," says Leary. "A coworker may respond exaggeratedly to a tiny slight, which then leads office mates to avoid her, which makes her more defensive. Or your teenage son may blow you off, which makes you more distant and stern, which makes him shut you out even more."
An Early Start
There's no one path to rejection sensitivity. Clinicians and researchers know that children of emotionally or physically abusive, neglectful, or critical parents tend to become highly sensitive to rebuffs. Also at risk are children who grow up in poverty or war zones, situations that can divert parental attention and undermine formation of secure bonds.
The quality of a child's relationship with parents is hardly the sole determinant of rejection-sensitivity. Also influential is the child's innate level of reactivity to stress. Genetic makeup or premature birth may set the nervous system on the skittish side, making a child hypersensitive to rejection even if parents are not abusive or neglectful. To counteract a riled-up rejection radar, however it gets set, says Downey, a child would need "superparents" attentive to his needs and feelings.
There's some evidence that a heavy dose of peer rejection in childhood can also precipitate rejection-sensitivity. A child who is constantly taunted by peers may, as a young adult, begin to expect rejection from romantic partners and coworkers, in spite of a secure attachment to Mom and Dad.
It's rare for anyone to become rejection-sensitive in adulthood. A young man whose fiancee leaves him may approach dates with wariness, but he wouldn't also expect rejection from everyone he encounters, including friends or coworkers.
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