Cognitive inhibitory control and Rejection Sensitivity
Cognitive Inhibitory Control as a Buffer Against
Rejection Sensitivity
Özlem Ayduk
Anett Gyurak
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Abstract
People high in Rejection Sensitivity (RS) anxiously expect, readily
perceive and react to perceived rejection with hostility. Previous
research indicates, however, that self-control ability may serve as a
protective factor against RS. Drawing from this research, this study
(N = 40) hypothesized that cognitive inhibitory control –
operationalized as resistance to interference in the Color Stroop
paradigm – would moderate high RS individuals' attentional
capture by rejection cues and their negative behavior towards
partners. The hypothesized interaction between RS and cognitive
inhibitory control was found such that high RS individuals with high
cognitive inhibitory control showed less attentional capture by
rejection and less hostile conflict behavior than high RS
participants with low cognitive inhibitory control. The implications
of these findings for protective mechanisms in RS dynamics are
discussed.
The Rejection Sensitivity (RS) model was developed to explain individual
differences in people’s reactions to interpersonal rejection (Downey &
Feldman, 1996). Extensive research to date has shown that because high RS
people enter into relationships already anxiously expecting rejection, they
show a readiness to perceive and overreact to rejection which compromises
their own well-being and undermines their relationships (see Pietrzak,
Downey & Ayduk, 2005 for review). However, new evidence is also emerging
that self-control ability may attenuate high RS’s vulnerability to such
negative outcomes (Ayduk, Mendoza-Denton, Mischel & Downey, Peake,
Rodriguez, 2000). Building from this research, the goal of the present study
was to examine whether cognitive inhibitory control ability – operationalized
as resistance to interference in the Color Stroop paradigm – moderated high
Cognitive inhibitory control and Rejection Sensitivity
RS individuals' attentional capture by rejection threat and their hostility
towards relationship partners.
Conceptualizing the processing dynamics of RS
Consistent with attachment accounts of cognition and affect in relationships
(e.g., Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Horney, 1937/1994), the RS model assumes that
early exposure to rejection leads people to develop anxious expectations of
rejection which then function as cognitive schemas to interpret and react to
others in subsequent relationships (Downey, Bonica, & Rincon, 1999;
Downey & Feldman, 1996; Downey, Khouri, & Feldman, 1997). It has been
hypothesized and empirically demonstrated that the possibility of rejection
leads to a sense of threat and foreboding in high RS individuals. For example,
in the human startle probe paradigm (e.g., Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1990)
high RS people show greater potentiation of their startle response in the
presence of rejection cues, indicating over-activation of their defensive
motivational system (Downey, Mougios, Ayduk, London, & Shoda, 2004).
Additionally, high RS individuals show greater attentional capture by
rejection stimuli in the emotional stroop paradigm (Berenson, Gyurak,
Ayduk, & Downey, 2007) further suggesting that even minimal rejection cues
activate threat-related defensive action tendencies in high RS people
(Algom, Chajut, & Lev, 2004). Given such sensitivity to rejection cues, it is not
surprising that high RS individuals show a greater tendency to interpret their
partners' ambiguous or negative behaviors as intentional rejection (Downey
& Feldman, 1996; Downey, Lebolt, Rincon, & Freitas, 1998).
When high RS individuals perceive rejection, they are already in a state of
heightened negative arousal and threat. Such threat related arousal has
been shown to make people vulnerable to act on automatic, emotional, and
impulsive behaviors at the expense of more cognitive and contemplative
response options (e.g., Davis, 1992; Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999) and this
process also manifests itself in the RS dynamics. For example, perceived
rejection in high RS women makes thoughts of hostility automatically more
accessible, which then translates into increased aggression towards their
rejector (Ayduk, Downey, Testa, Yen, & Shoda, 1999). Likewise, high RS men
in committed relationships are more at risk for violence against their
partners than low RS men (Downey, Feldman, & Ayduk, 2000). These
defensive behaviors elicit actual rejection from partners, creating a selffulfilling prophecy that maintains the high RS dynamics, and triggering an
increase in depressive symptoms (Ayduk, Downey, & Kim, 2001; Downey,
Cognitive inhibitory control and Rejection Sensitivity
Freitas, Michaelis & Khouri, 1998). Overall, this network of evidence supports
the idea that even minimal cues relevant to rejection put high RS people in a
defensive motivational state which sets off impulsive and sometimes
destructive behaviors that undermine high RS people’s well-being and longterm relationship goals.
Although high RS people’s increased vulnerability for negative outcomes is
well-established by the evidence reviewed above, Ayduk and colleagues
(Ayduk, et al., 2000; Ayduk, Zayas, Downey, Cole, Shoda, & Mischel, in press)
reasoned that individual differences in the ability to delay immediate
gratification assessed in Mischel’s classic preschool paradigm (Mischel,
Shoda & Rodriguez, 1989) might also moderate this effect. Number of
seconds children can wait for a preferred but delayed reward over a less
preferred by immediately available rewards in this paradigm taps into
children’s ability to inhibit impulsive tendencies (e.g., give up and settle for
the immediately available reward), and down-regulate frustration via
effective attention deployment strategies (e.g., distraction, reconstrual) en
route to attaining valued long-term goals (see and Mischel & Ayduk, 2004,
for a review). Furthermore, effective attention deployment during this
preschool delay task has been shown to predict inhibitory control in a
standard cognitive control task in adolescence (Eigsti, Zayas, Mischel, Shoda,
Ayduk, & Dadlani, et al., 2006).
Using performance in this paradigm as a measure of self-regulation, Ayduk
and colleagues indeed found that whereas high RS individuals who were
poor in delaying gratification as children were more vulnerable than low RS
individuals for a wide range of negative life outcomes (low self-esteem,
aggression, and borderline personality symptoms in adulthood), high RS
people who were good delayers in preschool were buffered from these
negative outcomes.
The Color Stroop: A measure of cognitive inhibitory control
The present study built from this literature and examined more directly the
role of cognitive inhibitory control as a moderator of RS. Cognitive inhibitory
control (also related to “attentional control") involves the ability to reduce
conflict in information processing by overriding, or inhibiting, irrelevant
salient information or prepotent responses in favor of the relevant items or
responses (Posner & Rothbart, 2000). Interference tasks such as the Stroop
are one of the most frequently used methods to measure cognitive
inhibitory control. In the present study, we therefore operationalized
Cognitive inhibitory control and Rejection Sensitivity
cognitive inhibitory control using the Color Stroop task (Stroop, 1935), in
which participants are asked to name out loud the ink-color in which a word
is written, rather than to read the word. When a color word (e.g. green) is
printed in an incongruent ink color, reaction time is slower than when the
color word and the ink color are congruent. Cohen, Dunbar, and McClelland
(1990) argue that this task activates two mental pathways simultaneously,
one more habitual that involves reading the word, and another, more
effortful, which involves naming the ink color in which the word is written.
Individuals are able to respond accurately and quickly to the extent that they
can inhibit their habitual response (i.e., reading) and execute the more
effortful one (i.e., color naming). Thus, individual differences in resistance to
Color Stroop interference (i.e., shorter reaction times and fewer errors) are
considered stable markers for cognitive inhibitory control ability (Block,
2005).
Cognitive inhibitory control as a moderator of the effect of RS on attentional
capture by rejection threat
As described earlier, the RS model argues that because the possibility of
rejection is so salient and threatening to high RS individuals, rejection cues
may disproportionately capture their attention. This expectation was
supported in a recent study that used the emotional stroop task (Berenson,
et al. 2007). Emotional Stroop (Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996 for
review) is a color-naming task where participants are presented with a list of
emotion-eliciting words and asked to name the color of the ink that each
word is printed in. The task’s most common use is to assess the extent to
which stimuli relevant to personal concerns (e.g., insect related words for
insect phobics) elicit automatic threat vigilance (or attentional capture by
threat) (Algom et al., 2004). To the extent that stimuli are personally
threatening, they elicit a defensive freezing response, which leads to slower
color-naming times.
Using this paradigm Berenson and colleagues (2007) found that high RS
people to show slower response times when presented with rejectionrelated words, indicating heightened attentional capture by rejection threat.
High RS people’s threat vigilance was specific to rejection words and was
not found for threat stimuli unrelated to rejection (e.g., accident).
In the current study, we examined whether the link between RS and
attentional capture by rejection is moderated by individual differences in the
Color Stroop performance. Based on the assumption that cognitive
Cognitive inhibitory control and Rejection Sensitivity
inhibitory control enables individuals to inhibit prepotent, highly accessible
reactions, we hypothesized that high RS individuals’ attentional capture by
rejection threat should be attenuated to the extent they have high cognitive
inhibitory control. Thus, in statistical terms, we expected an interaction
between RS and cognitive inhibitory control in predicting response times to
rejection words.
Cognitive inhibitory control as a moderator of the effect of RS on conflict
hostility
Ample evidence links high RS to increased behavioral hostility and
aggression in relationships (Ayduk, Gyurak, & Luerssen, in press; see Pietrzak
et al., 2005 for a review). It has been argued before that when individuals
experience negative interpersonal interactions such as conflicts, they face
the dilemma of whether to act destructively to the partner in accordance
with highly accessible, short-term goals (e.g., to hurt back, take revenge), or
to behave more constructively, and accommodate the partner in accordance
with long-term relationship goals (e.g., Arriaga & Rusbult, 1998; Yovetich &
Rusbult, 1994). These accommodation dilemmas can be resolved in favor of
constructive behaviors only when people have the cognitive resources to
engage in controlled processes allowing them to consider their long-term
consequences (Yovetich & Rusbult, 1994). When cognitive resources are
depleted, responses to accommodation dilemmas are driven by more
automatic, short-term considerations that favor self-centered destructive
reactions (e.g., taking revenge, hurting back).
Based on the foregoing analyses, we hypothesized in the current study that
when faced with conflicts with partners – a potent elicitor of rejection
concerns and hostility for high RS people (Downey et al., 1998), high RS
individuals with high cognitive inhibitory control, compared to people with
low cognitive inhibitory control, would be able to overcome their impulse to
behave negatively, showing less hostility towards their partners. In statistical
terms, we again expected an interaction between RS and cognitive
inhibitory control in predicting hostile behavior towards partners in conflicts.
Method
Participants
Participants were undergraduate students who were part of a larger study
reported elsewhere (Berenson et al., 2007). Because we examined the
moderating effects of cognitive inhibitory control on hostility towards
Cognitive inhibitory control and Rejection Sensitivity
current partners, this study focuses on the subset of the participants who
were involved in an ongoing relationship (N = 40, 50% male), reporting
previously unpublished findings from this larger study.
Participants completed the study in exchange for course credit. All had 20/20
or corrected 20/20 vision and no one in the sample was color-blind. Average
age was 21.1years (SD = 6.1) with 37.5% of the sample being Asian, 40.0%
Caucasian, 2.5% Hispanic, 2.5% African-American and 17.5 % multiple or other
ethnicities.
Procedure
Participants completed the study individually. The session started with
instructions for the Stroop tasks. Similar to methods used in
neuropsyhological assessment, the Stroop words were written on cards.
Participants were told that they would be shown a series of cards with
words on them and asked to say out loud the color of the ink that each word
was printed in if the word was printed in color ink, but to read the word itself
if it was printed in black ink. This switching component was included to make
the task reasonably difficult and challenging for college students (Wylie &
Allport 2000). Participants were told to try to be as quick and accurate as
possible as they were being timed and their errors were logged. For each
card, the experimenter began timing when the first color name was read and
stopped after the last color name was read.
After the administration of the Stroop tasks, participants completed
background questionnaires electronically on a computer. The questionnaires
included the Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire (RSQ) (Downey & Feldman,
1996), and a measure on hostile conflict tactics among several other
measures, which were not the focus of this study.
Measures & Materials
Stroop Cards. There were 5 cards that comprised the Stroop tasks (details
below): one for baseline color naming, one for Color Stroop, and three for
Emotional Stroop.
The baseline card was always administered first. The rest were presented in
random order. The baseline color naming card contained color words printed
in congruent ink color (the words purple, yellow, red, green, orange printed
in the same color) and served as a measure of color naming speed in the
absence of interference.
Cognitive inhibitory control and Rejection Sensitivity
The color stroop card included 5 color words (purple, yellow, red, green and
orange). It consisted of twenty lines, on each of which the 5 words
comprising that card appeared. Therefore, each of the 5 words appeared 20
times for a total of 100 words. On each line, words and colors were
randomized such that no word (or color) appeared twice on the same line,
and no consecutive words (or ink color) were the same. Each line contained
one word printed in black for the switch component. Furthermore, no same
word-ink color combination appeared on two consecutive lines. Cards were
printed using a professional quality printer on letter sized card stock paper
using 17 point “Courier New” font.
Three Emotional Stroop cards were included in the study: one for rejectionthreat, one for general negativity and one for neutral stimuli. However,
because prior research shows that high RS people show attentional
disruptions that are specific to processing rejection information and that are
not observed for negative and neutral stimuli (Ayduk et al., 1999; Berenson
et al., 2007), we focused on the rejection-threat Stroop data in the present
study.
Detailed description of the development and piloting of the stimuli used in
the emotional Stroop cards can be found in Berenson, et al., 2007. The 5
rejection words included were “ignored,” “unwanted,” “rejected,”
“disliked,” “shunned,” which were rated by pilot subjects as highly relevant
to rejection and high in negativity. The Rejection Stroop card used the same
5 colors and the sequencing rules as the Color Stroop card described above.
RSQ. The RSQ contains 18 items that depict hypothetical interpersonal
interactions where rejection by a significant other is possible (e.g. “You ask
your partner to move in with you”). For each situation, participants indicate
their level of anxiety about the possibility of rejection, as well as the
perceived likelihood (or the expectation) that the significant other depicted
will respond with rejection. For each scenario, the expected likelihood of
rejection is multiplied by the degree of anxiety and then these weighted
scores are averaged across the 18 situations. In this study the mean RSQ
score was 8.22 (SD = 2.53;  = .85).
Hostile conflict behavior. Participants were asked to recall the conflicts they
had with their current romantic partner over the last year and rate the
descriptiveness of a series of behaviors on a 1 (not at all descriptive) to 6
(extremely descriptive) scale. These items were loosely based on Straus
(1974) to tap into psychological/verbal aggression and onto Rusbult’s
Cognitive inhibitory control and Rejection Sensitivity
(Rusbult, 1993) construct of exit behavior: "insulted or swore at the other
person," "blamed the other person," said something intended to hurt the
other person’s feelings,” "stormed off," "threatened to leave the
relationship.” Ratings were averaged ( = .83) to create a hostile conflict
behavior composite (M = 2.48; SD = 1.18).
Stroop interference scores. Preliminary analyses showed participants made
very few errors in the Stroop tasks precluding any meaningful analysis using
them as an index of performance. Therefore, the primary analyses reported
below focus on response times.
Because all trials on the baseline color-naming card were congruent (colors
words and ink-color always matched), interference scores for color, and
rejection Stroop cards were computed as residuals after regressing response
times on each card on the baseline color-naming card. Interference times on
the Color Stroop card operationalized cognitive inhibitory control with lower
interference (i.e., faster response times), indicating higher cognitive
inhibitory control. Interference times on the rejection Stroop card
operationalized attentional capture by rejection threat with lower
interference (i.e., faster response times) indicating lower vigilance.
Results
Does cognitive inhibitory control interact with RS in predicting attentional
capture?
To examine the moderation hypothesis, we performed a regression analysis
on attentional capture by rejection threat (i.e., residualized reaction time
scores on the rejection Stroop card) with RS, cognitive inhibitory control
(i.e., residualized interference scores on the Color Stroop card) and their
interaction as predictors. Predictors were centered on their mean and used
as continuous variables.
Consistent with our hypothesis, the results yielded a significant RS X
cognitive control interaction F(3,36) = 4.44, p < .05. Figure 1 plots this
interaction using unstandardized parameter estimates from this analysis.
Simple slopes analyses (Aiken & West, 1991) conducted at 1 SD above and
below the mean on each predictor indicated that among people low in
cognitive inhibitory control, high RS people experienced more attentional
capture by rejection threat than their low RS counterparts (β = .33, t(38)=
2.76, p < .05 ). In contrast, among those high in cognitive inhibitory control,
Cognitive inhibitory control and Rejection Sensitivity
RS was not related to attentional capture by rejection threat (β = -.07, t(38) =
-.42, ns). Furthermore, the protective effect of high cognitive inhibitory
control (i.e., low interference, faster response times) against attentional
capture by rejection threat was greater among high RS (β = .95, t(38) = 6.58,
p < .05) than among low RS (β = .55, t(38) = 3.92, p < .05) participants.
Attentional capture by rejection
15
10
5
High Cognitive Control
Low Cognitive Control
0
-5
-10
Low RS
High RS
Figure 1. Attentional capture by rejection (i.e., response times for rejection
threat words) as a function of Rejection Sensitivity (RS) and Cognitive
inhibitory control.
Notes. Greater the interference to rejection words (i.e., slower response
times), greater the attentional capture. Greater the interference on the
Color Stroop (i.e., slower response times), lower the cognitive inhibitory
control. Attentional capture by rejection = .40 + .55 (RS) + .48 (Cognitive
inhibitory control)* + .05(RS x Cognitive inhibitory control)*. *p < .05.
Does cognitive inhibitory control interact with RS in predicting conflict
hostility?
Regression analysis also revealed the expected interaction between RS and
cognitive inhibitory control on conflict hostility, F(3,36) = 8.61, p < .05. Figure
2 plots this interaction using unstandardized parameter estimates from this
analysis. Simple slope analyses revealed that among participants low in
cognitive inhibitory control, RS was positively, but not significantly related to
more conflict hostility (β = .18, t(38)= 1.10, ns). Among people high in
cognitive inhibitory control, RS was negatively related to conflict hostility (β
Cognitive inhibitory control and Rejection Sensitivity
= -.60, t(38) = -2.43, p < .05). Furthermore, among high RS people high
cognitive inhibitory control (low interference, faster response times) was
related to less conflict hostility (β = .57, t(38) = 2.79, p < .05). Among low RS
people, cognitive control was not systematically related to hostile behavior
(β = -.21, t(38)= -1.08, ns).
High Cognitive Control
3.5
Low Cognitive Control
Hostile conflict behavior
3
2.5
2
1.5
Low RS
High RS
Figure 2. Hostile conflict behavior as a function of Rejection Sensitivity (RS)
and Cognitive inhibitory control.
Notes. Greater the interference on the Color Stroop (i.e., slower response
times), lower the cognitive inhibitory control. Hostile conflict behavior = 2.57
+ -.10 (RS) + .01 (Cognitive inhibitory control)* + .01 (RS x Cognitive inhibitory
control)*. * p < .05.
Discussion
The goal of the present study was to examine whether cognitive
inhibitory control – the ability to disengage from highly salient cues that
interfere with completion of a central task, and inhibiting prepotent habitual
responses – served as a protective factor against RS, a personality
disposition that is associated with both personal and interpersonal
difficulties. Using the cognitive Stroop paradigm to operationalize cognitive
inhibitory control, we tested two hypotheses and found support for them.
The first hypothesis was that cognitive inhibitory control would
moderate high RS individuals' attentional capture by rejection threat.
Cognitive inhibitory control and Rejection Sensitivity
Indeed, our findings indicated that whereas RS was positively related to
attentional capture by rejection among participants with low cognitive
control, this relationship was not significant among those high in cognitive
inhibitory control. In other words, cognitive control served as a protective
mechanism for high RS individuals, equating them to low RS people in their
tendency to show automatic vigilance for rejection threat.
Our second hypothesis was that cognitive inhibitory control would also
moderate the direct relationship established in prior research between RS
and hostility (e.g., Ayduk et al., 1999). In this sample, high RS was not
significantly related to higher means levels of conflict hostility however (r = .05). One reason for this could be that people who get involved in
relationships tend to be lower in RS (see Downey, Freitas et al., 1998) as the
case in this study. Furthermore, in relationships where partners are still
trying to secure each other’s commitment (as is typical in most college
dating situations), high RS individuals may inhibit active forms of hostility to
prevent rejection and secure acceptance (see Ayduk et al., 2003). Both of
these factors may have attenuated the direct relationship between RS and
negativity of behavior towards dating partners in the current sample.
Nevertheless, in moderation analysis testing our second hypothesis, we
found that high RS individuals high in cognitive inhibitory control were lower
in conflict hostility in comparison to high RS people low in cognitive control.
In fact, they reported lower hostility than even low RS individuals. Highly
similar to this pattern, Ayduk et al. (2000, Study 2) reported that high RS
middle school children with high delay of gratification ability tended to be
lower in peer aggression than low RS children. Altogether, one
interpretation of this overall pattern is that to the extent that high RS taps
into greater motivation to establish and maintain close relationships, having
the competencies that allow one to regulate their emotions in frustrating
and aversive social interactions enhances high RS individuals’ ability to inhibit
hostility towards partners more so than low RS participants, for whom
relationship maintenance goals may not be as salient, or self-relevant. On the
other hand, it is also possible that high RS people with self-regulatory
competencies overcompensate for their vulnerability, for example, through
over ingratiation (Romero-Canyas, Downey, Cavanaugh, & Pelayo, under
review), which in the long-term may also create difficulties for the
relationship and the self-concept of the individual. Clearly, this is an issue
that will be important for future research to pursue.
Cognitive inhibitory control and Rejection Sensitivity
As a whole, the present study yields evidence that cognitive inhibitory
control may be a protective mechanism against the maladaptive processing
dynamics of high RS. Availability of this controlled regulatory mechanism
seems to alter the RS dynamic at the level of early-attentive automatic
processing of rejection-related threat information suggesting interventions
that target processes prior to encoding might be particularly instrumental in
altering high RS individuals' maladaptive interpersonal behavior. However,
this does not preclude the possibility that cognitive inhibitory control may
also serve to break the link between RS and negative outcomes by directly
acting on more controlled processes operating during response generation
and response inhibition. Clearly, questions remain for future research, but
the study starts to yield evidence for the possible buffering effects of
cognitive inhibitory control against high RS.
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Author Note
Özlem Ayduk, Department of Psychology, University of California,
Berkeley; Anett Gyurak, Department of Psychology, University of California,
Berkeley.
This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Institute of
Mental Health (MH0697043).
We would like to thank Serena Chen, Geraldine Downey, John Kihlstrom,
Ethan Kross, and Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton for their helpful comments on
earlier versions of the manuscript, and Natalie Castriotta for her help in data
collection.
Address correspondence to Özlem Ayduk (ayduk@berkeley.edu),
3210 Tolman Hall, Department of Psychology, University of California,
Berkeley, CA 94720.