Human beings are acutely responsive to how other people perceive, evaluate, and feel about them. Not only are people attuned to others’ reactions to them, but perceiving that other people are interested, approving, or accepting typically evokes quite different reactions than perceiving that others are disinterested, disapproving, or rejecting (Leary, Koch, & Hechenbleikner, 2001; K. D. Williams, 2001). Furthermore, positive and negative reactions from others often affect how people perceive and feel about themselves, their perceptions of other people, and the quality of their interpersonal relationships (Buckley, Winkel, & Leary, 2004; Dion & Earn, 1995; Downey & Feldman, 1996; K. D. Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000). And, over time, positive responses from other people foster psychological and physical well-being, whereas long-term exposure to negative interpersonal reactions is associated with psychological difficulties and poor physical health (Pressman & Cohen, 2005; D. R. Williams, Neighbors, & Jackson, 2003). In brief, other people’s reactions exert a strong impact on people’s thoughts, emotions, motives, and behavior, as well as their physical and psychological well-being. In this article, we provide a theoretical framework for understanding the complex reactions people have to rejection-related experiences.
In light of the pervasive and powerful effects of social evaluations, it is not surprising that social and behavioral scientists have started to devote attention to how people respond to positive and negative reactions from other people and to the short- and long-term consequences of receiving approval and acceptance versus disapproval and rejection. Much of the earliest work along these lines involved children’s reactions to being rejected by their peers, showing that peer rejection not only creates a great deal of suffering in the rejected child but also predicts negative emotional and behavioral outcomes in the future (Kupersmidt, Burchinal, & Patterson, 1995; Prinstein & Aikins, 2004). Similarly, rejection or abandonment by romantic partners has been studied in research on unrequited love, betrayal, and relationship dissolution (Baumeister, Wotman, & Stillwell, 1993). Other work has examined the consequences of believing that one is a target of prejudice or discrimination because of one’s race (Major, Spencer, Schmader, Wolfe, & Crocker, 1998), weight (C. Miller, Rothblum, Felicio, & Brand, 1995), or the possession of some other stigmatizing characteristic (Kleck & Strenta, 1980). More recently, experimental studies have examined the effects of being rejected and ostracized by strangers on emotion, self-esteem, social judgments, and behavior (for reviews, see Abrams, Hogg, & Marques, 2005; Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Leary, 2001; K. D. Williams, 2001, 2007; K. D. Williams, Forgas, & von Hippel, 2005).
Unfortunately, despite the amount of theory and research that has focused on the effects of negative interpersonal experiences, two difficulties have impeded a comprehensive understanding of these effects. First, this work is currently scattered across a number of disparate areas of behavioral science and appears under the guise of a variety of different phenomena such as ostracism, exclusion, rejection, discrimination, stigmatization, prejudice, betrayal, unrequited love, peer rejection, bullying, neglect, loneliness, homesickness, and humiliation. Even though these negative interpersonal experiences appear to have much in common, researchers interested in each of these topics rarely acknowledge the others, and efforts to integrate the findings across these areas have been meager. One of our goals in this article is to draw from and integrate these diverse literatures as we examine reactions to negative interpersonal events.