Schedule of Events | Symposia

Rejection Sensitivity and Cognitive Control: Evidence beyond social context

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Rachel Gaynor¹, Bradley Buchanan¹, Sofia Laporte¹, Geoffrey Potts¹; ¹University of South Florida

Individuals vary in their tendency to expect, perceive, and respond to potential social rejection. These differences are indexed by Rejection Sensitivity (RS), a construct which longitudinal data has found to be predictive of the development of mood disorders. Psycho-physiological evidence has linked increased RS with reduced activity associated with cognitive control, yet most research has been conducted focusing only on affective stimuli which evoke rejection. The current study investigates whether the relationship between RS and cognitive control persists beyond social-affective context. Fifty-seven participants completed three blocks of a modified Flanker task; a social-affective block using facial images, an affective block containing IAPS images selected to have no social components, and a neutral block which consisted of normed fractal images. RS was measured using the 18-item Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire (RSQ), and cognitive control was measured using the conflict N2, an Event-Related Potential (ERP) measure associated with the recruitment of higher-level inhibition. Analysis conducted with Hierarchical Linear Modeling found that increasing RS is associated with overall reduced accuracy, and with attenuated N2 amplitude on incongruent trials. These findings suggest that high RS individuals exhibit a more generalized cognitive control deficit transcending social context. This broader reduction could contribute to maladaptive outcomes associated with RS, including heightened vulnerability to mood disorders.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions