On October 7, 2022, Assistant Professor of Psychology Gili Freedman and Justin Danier-Best (Bard College) published an article entitled "Who is more willing to engage in social rejection? The roles of self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, and negative affect in social rejection decisions" in The Journal of Social Psychology.
In this paper, Freedman and her collaborator examined the question of how self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, and symptoms of anxiety and depression are associated with willingness to engage in rejection. They found that self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, and general distress were associated with thinking that it would be difficult to reject someone in the future. But when they asked people about their most recent past rejection experience, only anxiety and general distress were associated with feeling that it had been difficult to reject.
In early September, Freedman was on So Curious! (the Franklin Institute's podcast) talking about her ghosting work in an episode titled "Ghosting: How Rejection Affects Our Bodies & Brains." Later that month, her ghosting work was featured in the Character & Context blog of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology.
