Who is most vulnerable to social rejection? The toxic combination of low self-esteem and lack of negative emotion differentiation on neural responses to rejection

SMC Author

Caitlin Powell

SMC Affiliated Work

1

Status

Faculty

School

School of Science

Department

Psychology

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-4-2014

Publication / Conference / Sponsorship

PLoS ONE

Description/Abstract

People have a fundamental need to belong that, when satisfied, is associated with mental and physical well-being. The current investigation examined what happens when the need to belong is thwarted—and how individual differences in self-esteem and emotion differentiation modulate neural responses to social rejection. We hypothesized that low self-esteem would predict heightened activation in distress-related neural responses during a social rejection manipulation, but that this relationship would be moderated by negative emotion differentiation—defined as adeptness at using discrete negative emotion categories to capture one's felt experience. Combining daily diary and neuroimaging methodologies, the current study showed that low self-esteem and low negative emotion differentiation represented a toxic combination that was associated with stronger activation during social rejection (versus social inclusion) in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula—two regions previously shown to index social distress. In contrast, individuals with greater negative emotion differentiation did not show stronger activation in these regions, regardless of their level of self-esteem; fitting with prior evidence that negative emotion differentiation confers equanimity in emotionally upsetting situations.

Scholarly

yes

Peer Reviewed

1

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0090651

Volume

9

Issue

3

First Page

1

Last Page

8

Disciplines

Psychology

Rights

Open Access journal

Original Citation

Caitlin Powell (Psychology): "Who is most vulnerable to social rejection? The toxic combination of low self-esteem and lack of negative emotion differentiation on neural responses to rejection," with Kashdan, T. B., DeWall, C. N., Masten, C. L., Pond, R. S. Jr., Combs, D., Schurtz, D. R., & Farmer, A. S. in PLoS ONE 9(3), 1-8 (2014). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0090651

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