Rejection sensitivity and schema-congruent information processing biases

Rejection Sensitivity (RS) refers to the tendency to anxiously anticipate, readily perceive and overreact to rejection. The current research assesses schema-congruent information processing biases related to RS. Specifically, we predicted that high RS individuals would show biases in attention and self-referential encoding and recall of rejection-relevant information. Similarly, we predicted stronger concordance between these biases among high RS than low RS individuals. People high in RS showed biases in self-referential encoding and recall of negative socially relevant material. However, RS was not characterized by an attention bias or by stronger concordance between information processing biases. Implications of these findings to the understanding of RS and its long lasting effects are discussed.