The Relationship Between Social Rejection And Aggression:the Moderation Role Of Interpersonal Self-support And The Underlying Neural Mechanism

Social rejection refers to the tendency to build a relationship with others, while refuse by the target, or ignorant by others without any explanation. Despite prior study reveal that social rejection elicits aggression, there was nevertheless individual difference in people’s reactivity to rejection. Not everyone who is rejected becomes angry and aggressive. Recently, some research indicates that personality traits such as rejection sensitivity and narcissism could moderate the relationship between social rejection and aggression. However, prior study about the relationship among personality, social rejection, aggression only concern about one personality trait in a case, thus forget the interaction between different personality traits and its possible influence to the aggression after social rejection. Therefore, current study aims at investigating whether different personality traits is interacted with each other and influence the degree of aggression after social rejection together, by using an indigenous Chinese positive personality concept called Interpersonal self-support. We design two experiments to test the hypothesisIn experiment one, sixty six college students were either included or excluded from an on-line ball-tossing game by two same-age peers. The game began with one of the players throwing the ball to the participant. The participant was then required to indicate to whom they would like to throw the ball to by clicking on the appropriate player icon. In both condition, the game lasted for60trails. In first30trail of ostracism condition, the participant received the ball as usual as other two peers (approximately1/3of the time), while in the last30trails of rejection condition, the participants could never receive the ball so as to be completely excluded from the game. In the control condition, the participant randomly received the ball approximately33%of the time. After finishing the game, all the participants were asked to complete a standard post-experimental questionnaire contain six questions that has been used in previous research. The results show that (1) the interaction between Interpersonal responsibility and condition is negatively correlated with aggression, the interaction between Interpersonal openness and condition is negatively correlated with aggression.(2) The interaction between Interpersonal responsibility and condition as well as the interaction between Interpersonal openness and condition could not predict the degree of aggression.(3) The social rejection-aggression relationship is strongest among people who are low in both Interpersonal responsibility and Interpersonal openness than among people who are high in either Interpersonal responsibility and Interpersonal opennessA further research was conducted to investigate the possible neural mechanism that Interpersonal responsibility and Interpersonal openness could moderate the relationship between social rejection and aggression. In experiment two, we used fMRI to record eleven college students’ neural response during which they were excluded from an online-game by two peers. Findings from a whole brain analysis reveal that people high in both Interpersonal responsibility and Interpersonal openness related to more activity in the medical prefrontal cortex(MPFC) and lateral prefrontal cortex(LPFC)-regions previously linked with empathy and emotion regulation(e.g., reappraisal) than people low in both these traits. These findings consistent with our hypothesis that empathy and positive emotion regulation strategy may the underlying mechanism which the Interpersonal responsibility and Interpersonal openness could moderate the relationship between social rejection and aggression.