Negative social feedback is an inevitable part of life. Attempts at romance sometimes fall short, some job interviews will not yield offers, and the media bombards us with messages that we lack physical attractiveness. Even highly successful individuals will experience negative feedback from time to time. How do we integrate such negative cues into our self-worth?

To understand how negative feedback influences self-worth, it is important to consider the role of contingencies of self-worth, or the domains in which people stake their self-worth. When self-worth is contingent on feedback in a domain, positive feedback increases self-worth whereas negative feedback decreases self-worth. However, when self-worth is not contingent on feedback in a domain, self-worth is unaffected by domain outcomes. For instance, positive and negative academic feedback influences the self-worth of students whose self-worth is contingent on academic outcomes, but this feedback is unrelated to the self-worth of students who do not base self-worth on such outcomes (Crocker, Karpinski, Quinn, & Chase, 2003; Crocker, Sommers, & Luhtanen, 2002). Thus, low contingencies of self-worth in a given domain can insulate self-worth from negative feedback in that domain.

While contingencies of self-worth are relatively stable over time, people can shift their contingencies from moment to moment. For instance, when people feel threatened that they might confirm a negative group stereotype, they are more likely to disengage, or decrease the degree to which self-worth is contingent in a domain (Nussbaum & Steele, 2007). As such, disengaging from threatening situations may be a way to protect self-worth from negative social feedback. However, not everyone disengages from negative feedback. In contrast, some people ruminate and define their self-worth by past failures. While it is intuitive that individuals vary in the tendency to disengage from negative feedback, previous research has not established a way to capture a person’s tendency to disengage from negative feedback, or whether this tendency predicts well-being.

Accordingly, my colleagues and I aimed to capture individual differences in the tendency to disengage from negative feedback. In a recently published report (Leitner, Hehman, Deegan, & Jones, 2013), we developed the Adaptive Disengagement Scale, a simple questionnaire that taps a person’s tendency to disengage self-worth from negative feedback (e.g., “I am good at ‘shaking off’ failures and keeping a positive attitude). Results showed that people who disengage self-worth from negative feedback tend to have improved well-being, as evidenced by increased self-esteem, emotion regulation, optimism, and decreased depression and anxiety. Moreover, a person’s tendency to disengage from negative feedback appeared to be independent of these aforementioned constructs.

To test whether higher scores on the Adaptive Disengagement Scale actually predicted disengagement and self-worth in the face of negative feedback, we conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, individuals who varied on the Adaptive Disengagement Scale played a computerized ball-tossing game and experienced social inclusion or exclusion, after which they reported state self-esteem. Results showed that social exclusion decreased state self-esteem for individuals low in adaptive disengagement tendencies, but this effect was attenuated for participants high in adaptive disengagement tendencies. This experiment served as initial evidence that the effect of negative social feedback on self-worth depends on a person’s tendency to disengage from negative feedback.

In a second experiment, we aimed to elucidate the extent to which people are conscious of the disengagement process as it occurs. To that end, participants experienced negative, positive, or neutral social feedback, after which we measured disengagement at more implicit and explicit levels. As in the initial experiment, we found that high levels of adaptive disengagement buffered state self-esteem from negative social feedback. Additionally, participants who scored higher on the Adaptive Disengagement Scale responded to negative feedback with implicit (but not explicit) disengagement, suggesting that individuals may be unaware of disengagement processes as they occur. Furthermore, implicit disengagement following negative social feedback predicted greater state self-esteem. These findings are consistent with other research showing that individuals scoring higher in adaptive disengagement show decreased attentional processing of negative feedback, as indexed via neural activity (i.e., alpha oscillations in the medial frontal cortex) in the first 500 ms after viewing the negative feedback (Leitner, Hehman, Jones, & Forbes, 2014).

Together, this research suggests that individuals vary in the tendency to disengage self-worth from negative social feedback, and that this tendency is an important component of well-being. This work builds upon previous research by showing that disengagement from negative outcomes is an individual difference variable that is important in a variety of social domains, and that disengagement processes may be largely implicit.

Given that adaptive disengagement buffers self-worth from negative social feedback, it will be important for future work to understand how adaptive disengagement contributes to well-being among individuals that are at increased risk for encountering negative social feedback. Additionally, little is known about how disengagement affects performance, and future work should examine the conditions under which adaptive disengagement predicts increased or decreased performance. Indeed, a better understanding of adaptive disengagement may provide greater insight into the roots of self-esteem maintenance and well-being.


References

Crocker, J., Karpinski, A., Quinn, D. M., & Chase, S. K. (2003). When grades determine self-worth: Consequences of contingent self-worth for male and female engineering and psychology majors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology85, 507-516.

Crocker, J., Sommers, S. R., & Luhtanen, R. K. (2002). Hopes dashed and dream fulfilled: Contingencies of self-worth and graduate school admissions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin28, 1275-1286.

Leitner, J. B., Hehman, E., Deegan, M. P., & Jones, J. M. (2014). Adaptive disengagement buffers self-esteem from negative social feedback. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,

Leitner, J. B., Hehman, E., Jones, J. M., & Forbes, C. E. (2014). Self-enhancement influences medial frontal cortex alpha power to social rejection feedback. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 40, 1435-1450.

Nussbaum, A. D., & Steele, C. M. (2007). Situational disengagement and persistence in the face of adversity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology43, 127-134.


Jordan Leitner is currently a post-doctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley.  His research explores how self-regulation influences how people respond to social threat.  Specifically, he is interested in understanding how subtle shifts in attention impact well-being in the face of interpersonal rejection, discrimination, and intergroup anxiety.