Is it possible that adolescents' emotional reactions to interpersonal rejection and acceptance are regulated by self distinctiveness?

The experiment examined the regulative function of self distinctiveness in adolescents and tested two hypotheses. One of them was derived from the sociometer model of self-esteem, according to which self-esteem monitors others' reactions and alerts an individual to the possibility of social rejection. It was predicted that exclusion and neutral conditions lead to more negative and less positive emotional reactions than does acceptance. The second hypothesis posits that adolescents with a less distinctive self are more sensitive to evaluation from an interaction partner than are those with high self distinctiveness. The experiment indeed showed that social rejection caused more negative emotions than acceptance and that self distinctiveness might regulate negative emotion in subjects who had been rejected. peerReviewed publishedVersion