Gili Freedman, assistant professor of psychology, has recently been published in Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology titled, “Does engaging in social rejection heighten or diminish social processing?”
According to the article, engaging in social rejection can lead to feeling both increased social power and decreased belongingness. Yet, social power is associated with diminished social sensitivity, whereas threatened belongingness can enhance social sensitivity. In a registered report, Freedman and coauthors tested these competing hypotheses of how engaging in social rejection may affect social sensitivity. Contrary to the competing hypotheses tested, they did not find evidence that social rejection, compared to social acceptance, led to increased or decreased social sensitivity. An exploratory analysis found that men who engaged in rejection showed decreased social sensitivity compared to men who did not engage in rejection.
The full article is now available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23743603.2019.1684820?needAccess=true.
