SOCIAL REJECTION AND SELF-AFFIRMATIONS
(Posted 2011-08-16 12:09:50 by Ray Lopez)

An interesting study just got published in the premier experimental
psychology journal, _Psychological Science_.  

The purpose of the study was to look at the effects of "self-affirmations"
on perceived social rejection.  People who are very insecure tend to be
very sensitive to rejection by others.  This phenomenon is sometimes called
"rejection sensitivity".  Since they're always sensitive, they oftentimes
act in ways that drives people away.  Thus, these folks end up stuck in a
never-ending loop of sensitivity, rejection, and anxiety.

When you're in this cycle, help seems impossible.  You can't get help from
others because you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting
for them to "reject" you.  If someone else DOES try to help, they
inevitably end up committing some sort of perceived offense, and the
sensitive person is left alone again.  It is a vicious self-fulfilling
prophecy that seems inescapable.

The authors of this new study, Danu Anthony Stinson, Christine Logel,
Steven Shepard, and Mark P. Zanna, hypothesized that self-affirmations
would be helpful to persons sensitive to social rejection.  This hypothesis
starts with the concept of "relational insecurity", which in this study is
defined as a lack of confidence in feeling valued by the people you are
interacting with at any given moment.  This relational insecurity seems to
come from feelings of inferiority, and manifests itself when the insecure
person comes across as cold and standoffish.  This standoffish behavior
usually puts off other people.  Thus, the "sad irony" of the fact that
people who crave relationships the most are the ones who act in such a way
as to drive people off.  

The good news is that there is some earlier research which suggests that
these people are aided by certain social cues that indicate the risk of
rejection is low.  When exposed to these cues, insecure people are quite
capable of acting "... in a relaxed, calm, and positive manner, at least in
the short term."  

So if these folks are capable of positive social interactions, is there
anything that can be done for them to help in the long-term?  This is where
the power of "self-affirmations" come into play.  Self-affirmations are
activities that people can use to bolster their impressions of themselves. 
For example, you can ask people to reflect on positive events in their
lives, or positive values that underlie the behavior you're hoping to
influence (e.g., confidence, attractiveness, likeability).  There is plenty
of prior research showing that self-affirmations work for all sorts of
thing like academic performance and weight loss.  Thus, the purpose of this
research was to see if self-affirmations can be used to assist people in
the world of social interactions.  Social interactions go beyond a single
individual trying to lose weight or stop smoking.  However, the authors of
this paper hypothesized that self-affirmations might help sensitive
individuals by buffering "... insecure participants against social
self-threats, and this buffering would be evident in sustained improvements
to insecure participants’ relational security (an indicator of resistance
to self-threat) and improvements in their social behavior (e.g., reactions
to self-threat)."

To test this hypothesis, undergraduate students were asked to rate their
relational security with five friends and five family members. They were
then asked to rank a set of personal values (e.g., academics) from most
important to least important.  Afterwards the subjects were randomly
assigned to two groups.  The subjects in the first group were asked to
write a short essay describing why their top ranked value was important to
them.  This was a clever way to get them to reflect on their values, and
develop a set of self-affirmations.  The other group was asked to focus on
their ninth-ranked value, and write an essay describing why that value
would be important to someone else.  Afterwards, subjects in both groups
were re-tested twice within two months for relational security and also
interviewed by a person trained to rate the subjects' social demeanor.  

The results of the study suggested first that relational security is highly
stable, because subjects who did not write self-affirmations about their
values showed consistent relational security scores across time.  The
second finding was the most important, in that those subjects with
initially low relational security showed a statistically significant
increase in relational security.  Furthermore, this increase was persistent
and stable across the two months of the study.

This is an important finding, because it speaks to a phenomenon that
victimizes many people into a state of anxiety and depression.  The recent
plethora of psychological investigations into social rejection came about
as an outgrowth of research on bullying in schools and workplaces.  Social
rejection is a form of bullying that is commonplace in schools and
workplaces, and it is evident that some people are more sensitive to this
form of intimidation than others.  If we can develop cheap, simple, and
effective measures to protect people against the effects of social
rejection, this would go a long way in helping to reduce the incidence of
anxiety and depression in those suffering from relational insecurity.  

_*Article referenced*:  Stinson, D., Logel, C., Shepherd, S., and Zanna, M.
(2011). Rewriting the self-fulfilling prophecy of social rejection.
Psychological Science, 22, 1-5_

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