The buffering effects of rejection-inhibiting attentional training on social and performance threat among adult students

Abstract

Concerns about social rejection can be disruptive in an academic context. We set out to train a positive cognitive habit that would buffer against social and performance threat thereby making students less vulnerable and more resilient to rejection. Participants from adult education centers (n = 150) were first trained to inhibit rejection using a specially designed computer task, and were then taken through a rejection and failure manipulation. Results showed that of the most vulnerable participants with low explicit and low implicit self-esteem, those in the experimental condition exhibited significantly less vigilance for rejection compared to their counterparts in the control condition. The attentional training also made participants with low explicit self-esteem feel less rejected after a rejection manipulation and less willing to persevere on a virtually impossible anagrams task. Finally, participants in the experimental condition reported less interfering thoughts of being rejected while completing the anagrams task, and overall higher state self-esteem after having been rejected and experiencing failure. The results show that training positive social cognitions can have beneficial self-regulatory outcomes in response to social and performance threat in a school context.

Introduction

Academic learning typically takes place in a social context, and the school environment can be an important source of social stress. As such, academic achievement has recently been described as not only reflecting a purely cognitive learning process but a combination of cognitive and social learning processes (Patrick, 1997, Welsh et al., 2001). In particular, social rejection and the stress it often causes can interfere with normal learning activities. For example, it is suggested that rejected students are more likely to experience a limited amount of positive peer interaction opportunities thereby depriving them of learning normal, adaptive social conduct and social cognitions (Parker & Asher, 1987). Concerns about rejection can contribute to self-regulation difficulties that undermine academic performance and later school adjustment (Buhs, Ladd, & Herald, 2006).

The detrimental impact of social rejection concerns is evident in peer rejected students, who have been shown to exhibit increased absenteeism (DeRosier, Kupersmidt, & Patterson, 1994), higher rates of school dropout (Parker & Asher, 1987), and lower achievement (Austin and Draper, 1984, Buhs et al., 2006, DeRosier et al., 1994, French and Waas, 1985, O’Neil et al., 1997, Welsh et al., 2001). It is also evident in first-year college students for whom emotional factors are considered major causes of attrition (Szulecka, Springett, & de Pauw, 1987) and for whom good emotional and social health increases the chances of succeeding in college (Leafgran, 1989). Academic work habits are influenced by peer rejection as early as when students start kindergarten: peer rejection in kindergarten has been linked to deficits in work habits and academic achievements assessed in later grades, while stable social acceptance has been shown to buffer early academic difficulty (O’Neil et al., 1997). As we review shortly, the impact of social experiences, including rejection and acceptance, is profoundly shaped by the individual’s cognitive orientation to the experience, including any tendency to be highly vigilant for and attentive to signs of rejection in their interactions. Therefore, the social cognitions one develops to confront the complex social environment at school are not only important for healthy peer interactions and social functioning but also for developing work habits conducive to academic success, from kindergarten right through to university. Our primary research objective for the current study was to see whether re-training adult students’ negative social cognitions, in particular their hypervigilance for rejection, would positively influence their emotional and behavioral self-regulatory strategies when faced with social and performance threats.

Some authors have identified individual differences in several cognitive processes that influence academic performance, most of them relating to low self-esteem in one way or another. One cognitive process that is correlated with low self-esteem is rejection sensitivity, which is people’s tendency to defensively expect, readily perceive, and overreact to social rejection (Downey & Feldman, 1996). Students high in this hypersensitivity for rejection have been shown to experience increased difficulties in school with peers and teachers, to disengage from school, and to show declines in grades as well as increases in absenteeism and suspensions (Downey, Lebolt, Rincon, & Freitas, 1998).

Another cognitive process contributing to poor academic functioning is cognitive interference, which is a phenomenon whereby the cognitive processing of one task impedes or interferes with the processing of a second and simultaneously occurring task. Test anxiety that arises under performance and achievement-oriented conditions, is one type of cognitive interference which is associated with poor academic functioning. Test anxiety is defined as “intrusive thoughts that keep the individual from directing full attention to the task at hand” (Sarason, 1984, p. 932). People high in test anxiety experience greater cognitive interference which causes poor performance (Sarason, 1984, Sarason and Stroops, 1978). The cognitive interference in test anxiety, often involving thoughts of failure or fear of rejection, can perpetuate a cycle of self-preoccupying worry. These negative self-preoccupations in turn interfere with the demands of the task at hand and negatively impact performance. Whereas students high in anxiety are presumed to divide their attention between task demands and personal concerns that take the form of self-preoccupations, those lower in anxiety devote a greater proportion of their resources to the task at hand. Therefore the ability to limit social worries and distractions is a beneficial self-regulatory strategy for task completion and performance.

Specific individual differences in strategies for the self-regulation of behavior have also emerged in the literature, often correlating with people’s overall self-evaluation of their own worth, that is, their self-esteem. Whereas individuals with high self-esteem are primarily motivated to achieve success, individuals with low self-esteem are motivated to avoid failure, making for different patterns of behavioral persistence (Baumeister and Tice, 1985, Di Paula and Campbell, 2002, Tice, 1993). Specifically, individuals with high self-esteem have been shown to persist longer than individuals with low self-esteem but only when in a situation where the possibility of eventual success remains (McFarlin et al., 1984, Sommer and Baumeister, 2002). When faced with repeated failures, individuals with high self-esteem actually persist less than individuals with low self-esteem, reflecting an effective self-regulatory strategy that enables them to disengage from the task and stop their unproductive persistence (Di Paula & Campbell, 2002). Therefore, tenacious persistence per se is not a sign of effective self-regulation. In fact, effective self-regulation involves a constellation of strategies that monitor the available situational information that inform the individual when it is efficient to either persist on a task or detach from an unattainable goal. Individuals with low self-esteem oftentimes show maladaptive patterns of persistence which can engender negative affect and low self-regard (Di Paula & Campbell, 2002).

Given the evidence linking healthy self-esteem with adaptive self-regulation in the school context, it is not surprising that educators have often sought to “boost” students’ overall self-esteem with praise and positive reinforcement in the hopes of improving academic performance. However, this strategy has not withstood rigorous experimental test. By and large, interventions aimed at boosting self-esteem in this way have not shown related increases in academic performance (Baumeister et al., 2003, Scheirer and Kraut, 1979).

We propose that the links between self-esteem, self-regulation, and performance might be clarified through further examination of the construct of self-esteem. In recent influential contributions to the literature, self-esteem has been characterized as primarily a sociometer system that monitors individuals’ social inclusionary status (Leary, Tambor, Terdal, & Downs, 1995). As such, when evaluating one’s general sense of self-worth, feelings of self-esteem are suggested to derive from social cognitive processes that perceive, interpret, and regulate one’s construal of social feedback, to produce a sense of being accepted and respected versus rejected and criticized. In this light, well-regulated social cognitive processes can buffer the impact of rejection and lead to effective regulation of emotions, effective goal pursuit, and in turn, feelings of self-esteem.

Following the reasoning of the sociometer model, recent research has documented that low self-esteem is associated with a pattern of biased attention toward social rejection. Dandeneau and Baldwin (2004) used an Emotional Stroop task to investigate the association between vigilance for rejection information and low self-esteem. Whereas the original Stroop task asked participants to quickly name the ‘ink’ color of color words, the Emotional Stroop task asks participants to name the ink color of emotional words (see Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996, for a review of the Emotional Stroop Task). Emotional words that resonate with participants’ emotional vulnerability (e.g. ‘slither’ for snake phobics) create greater cognitive interference than neutral words (e.g. ‘table’ or ‘spoon’) and therefore produce longer color-naming reaction times. Dandeneau and Baldwin (2004) used interpersonal rejection (e.g. rejected, excluded, unwanted), acceptance (e.g. accepted, liked, wanted) and non-interpersonal neutral words (e.g. table, spoon, kitchen) in an Emotional Stroop task and found that people with low self-esteem showed greater Stroop interference on rejection words than acceptance words relative to their high self-esteem counterparts. These results provided initial support for the idea that low self-esteem involves cognitive habits, presumably stemming from repeated exposures to rejection and past exclusions that increase vigilance for rejection cues. This in turn increases the likelihood of perceiving or interpreting social cues as signs of rejection thereby perpetuating a vicious cycle of low self-esteem (Dandeneau and Baldwin, 2004, Dandeneau et al., 2007).

Our current study built on recent research indicating that it may be possible to break the vicious cycle of low self-esteem by retraining the detrimental attentional bias pattern. A computer task designed to teach participants to ignore rejection by having them identify a smiling/approving face as quickly as possible in a 4 × 4 grid of distracting frowning faces has shown positive cognitive, psychological, behavioral, and physiological effects (Dandeneau et al., 2007). By repeatedly doing the task for over 100 trials, participants learn to focus their attention on acceptance and ignore rejection, gradually retraining their attentional system to be less vigilant for rejection.

The rejection-inhibiting training task has been shown to modify the attentional bias for rejection that people with low self-esteem exhibit (Dandeneau and Baldwin, 2004, Dandeneau et al., 2007). Participants with low self-esteem in the experimental rejection-inhibiting training task experienced significantly less Stroop interference on rejection words, and a significantly lower bias for rejection than their counterparts in the control condition who were trained to identify the 5-petaled flower in a 4 × 4 grid of 7-petaled flowers (Dandeneau & Baldwin, 2004). Dandeneau et al. (2007) also showed similar results with a different measure of attentional bias, the Visual Probe Test (described shortly). As well, when the trainer task was administered for a week to students studying for the their final exam, students showed significantly lower self-reported levels of stress for their final exam, less anxiety during their exam, and greater academic self-esteem than their counterparts in the control condition (Dandeneau et al., 2007, Study 3a). Administered for a week to telemarketing representatives working in a highly stressful and social evaluative context, the experimental training task showed beneficial psychological, physiological, and behavioral effects: Those in the experimental condition reported an increase in self-esteem and a decrease in perceived stress by the end of the week, significantly lower level of the stress hormone cortisol, and a 68% increase in sales during training week (Dandeneau et al., 2007, Study 3b). Overall, the rejection-inhibiting training task appears to influence the early stages of social perception, re-tuning the attentional filter to be less vigilant for rejection thereby circumventing the effects of social stress.

In an attempt to recruit participants who had experienced difficulty in their academic life, we asked students at remedial schools, namely adult education centers, to participate in our current study. Participants were recruited from 3 adult education centers whose purpose is to offer adults of all ages who have dropped out of junior or high school a flexible learning program to obtain their diploma. Our primary purpose was to see if modifying the students’ negative social cognitions, in particular the hypervigilance for rejection, would influence their emotional and behavioral self-regulatory strategies in reaction to an overt rejection and a performance threat. Specifically, we wondered whether students trained to inhibit rejection would show the effective self-regulatory responses of inhibiting feelings of rejection after overt rejection, less cognitive interference while working on a school-like task, less persistence after repeated failure, and higher state self-esteem after undergoing social and performance threats.

In addition, we wished to explore whether implicit self-esteem, one’s unconscious feelings of self-worth, plays a supplementary role to that of explicit self-esteem in the processing of rejection information. Whereas explicit self-esteem, usually measured with a self-report questionnaire (e.g. Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, Fleming-Courtney Feelings of Inadequacy Scale), reflects people’s conscious evaluations of self-worth, implicit self-esteem, usually measured with a speeded categorization task of self, other, good, and bad words (e.g. Self-esteem Implicit Association Task) or the Name Letter preference measure, taps into people’s unconscious feelings of self-worth that are often unobstructed by self-presentational processes. A growing number of studies are showing the unique contributions individual differences in implicit self-esteem have above and beyond those of explicit self-esteem (e.g. Baccus et al., 2004, Jordan et al., 2003), therefore, we examined this possibility in the current study.

In the present study, participants were asked to complete either the experimental (find-the-smile) attentional training condition or the control (find-the-flower) condition. After the training, participants underwent a rejection manipulation where they were overtly rejected by a peer “Carole”, then completed a set of 3 difficult anagrams meant to induce failure and test self-regulation responses. We hypothesized that participants with low self-esteem who received the find-the-smile training would exhibit reduced vigilance for rejection compared to those in the control condition. We expected that those in the experimental condition would report lower feelings of rejection after having been rejected by Carole, and less persistence on the extremely difficult anagrams. We also anticipated that participants with low self-esteem in the experimental conditions would report less cognitive interference during the anagrams task showing that they were better able to concentrate on the task, and higher levels of state self-esteem after having experienced rejection and failure than those in the control condition. To address these hypotheses, we submitted the criterion variables (vigilance for rejection, feelings of rejection, persistence on anagrams, and state self-esteem) to multiple regression analyses with condition, explicit self-esteem, implicit self-esteem, and all 2-way and 3-way interaction terms used as predictors.