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.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-4-2014
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0090651
Repository Citation
Kashdan, Todd B.; Dewall, C. Nathan; Masten, Carrie L.; Pond, Richard S. Jr.; Powell, Caitlin; Combs, David; Schurtz, David R.; and Farmer, Antonina S., "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" (2014). Psychology Faculty Publications. 125.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/psychology_facpub/125
Notes/Citation Information
Published in PLoS ONE, v. 9, issue 3, no. e90651.
© 2014 Kashdan et al.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.