REALITYWIPE

RESEARCHERS

The Science of Rejection Sensitivity: Why the Fear of Rejection Often Creates the Rejection It Dreads

3 the researchers behind it — "They went quiet for a minute and I knew they were done with me." Rejection sensitivity isn't the same as disliking rejection — everyone dislikes reje

Columbia University

Geraldine Downey

Known for:The rejection sensitivity model — how anxious expectations of rejection shape and can sabotage relationships

Key findings

  1. 1996

    Rejection sensitivity — anxiously expecting, readily perceiving, and overreacting to rejection — leads people to read intentional rejection into ambiguous behavior of new partners, and both rejection-sensitive people and their partners report lower relationship satisfaction. ↗

  2. 1998

    Rejection expectancies operate as a self-fulfilling prophecy: in daily-diary and observational studies of couples, high rejection sensitivity predicted conflict processes that eroded relationships, and couples with a high-rejection-sensitive woman were far more likely to have broken up a year later (44% vs 15%). ↗

University of California, Los Angeles

Naomi I. Eisenberger

Known for:Neuroscience of social pain — showing that social rejection recruits brain regions overlapping those for physical pain

Key findings

  1. 2003

    Using fMRI during a Cyberball exclusion, found that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex — linked to the distress of physical pain — was more active during exclusion, and its activation tracked how much social distress participants reported. ↗

  2. 2010

    In a collaboration testing the social-pain overlap, acetaminophen — an ordinary physical painkiller — reduced daily self-reported hurt feelings and dampened neural responses to social rejection over three weeks, relative to placebo. ↗

Duke University

Kenneth A. Dodge

Known for:Foundational research on hostile attribution bias in children — showing that early experiences of maltreatment shape children's processing of ambiguous social cues as hostile, laying groundwork for later RS theory

Key findings

  1. 1980

    Dodge demonstrated that children who had experienced physical abuse were significantly more likely than non-abused peers to attribute hostile intent to others in ambiguous peer interaction scenarios — establishing that early relational trauma creates systematic biases in the processing of social cues. ↗

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