Rejection sensitivity across sex, sexual orientation, and age: Measurement invariance and latent mean differences.

Abstract

Intergroup differences in personality might be determined by systematic variation in social status and social experiences across groups. Because of its close association with social experiences, rejection sensitivity (RS)-a tendency toward anxious expectations of, and hypersensitivity to, interpersonal rejectionrepresents one such personality disposition that might differ across social groups, with implications for understanding mental health disparities. After first evaluating measurement invariance of the Adult Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire (A-RSQ), the present research sought to assess whether latent mean differences in RS emerged across sex, sexual orientation, and age in a population-based sample of Swedish young adults (age 18-36; N = 1,679). Analyses revealed that the scale achieved full configural, metric, and scalar invariance across sex and sexual orientation and partial scalar invariance across age. As expected, tests of latent mean differences indicated that women, sexual minorities, and people 18-29 years old exhibited significantly higher RS levels than men, heterosexuals, and people 30-36 years old, respectively. Findings from the present research highlight the utility of attending to group differences in maladaptive personality dispositions and information processing styles and their potential role in contributing to persistent mental health hardships uniquely affecting women, sexual minorities, and younger people. Implications for scale administration and future research into the social causes and consequences of RS are discussed. Public Significance StatementThe Adult Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire measures rejection sensitivity (RS), a personality type marked by highly anxious expectations about rejection, in the same way across sex and sexual orientation but slightly differently across age groups. RS is higher among women, sexual minorities, and younger people than among men, heterosexuals, and older people.

Hypervigilance: An Understudied Mediator of the Longitudinal Relationship Between Stigma and Internalizing Psychopathology Among Sexual Minority Young Adults

“…This finding may capture important distinctions in these processes. Whereas hypervigilance is increasingly conceptualized as a form of heightened attending and/or responding to stigma-related threat (Diamond & Alley, 2022), sexual orientation-related rejection sensitivity and rumination may better reflect individual differences in the extent to which sexual minority individuals are predisposed to perceive and/or process social stimuli as stigmatizing (Brosschot et al, 2006;Maiolatesi et al, 2022). Moving forward, it will be important for scholars to assess these constructs separately and to avoid their conflation in the absence of convergent validity.…”

“…However, these constructs may better represent personality dispositions and/or processing systems that inform situationally activated stigma appraisals and/or schemas (e.g., whether particular social situations are viewed as stigmatizing), which-although likewise shaped by stigma-precede and modulate rather than constitute and co-occur with hypervigilance (Brosschot et al, 2006;Diamond & Alley, 2022;Maiolatesi et al, 2022). As detailed in the next sections, the conflation of hypervigilance with these related yet arguably distinct constructs has hindered conceptual and mechanistic understandings of hypervigilance in sexual minority mental health research on three fronts.…”

“…Measures of these two constructs, however, predominantly assess how stigma cues are perceived (e.g., probable vs. improbable), appraised (e.g., threatening vs. safe), and/or self-referentially processed (e.g., internal vs. external to the self). Accordingly, they may not index the intensity of attentional and/or behavioral responses to stigma-related threat but instead capture individual differences in dispositional tendencies to cognitively-affectively process potentially stigmatizing social situations as expected, concerning, and/or self-salient (Ayduk & Gyurak, 2008;Brosschot et al, 2006;Maiolatesi et al, 2022).…”

Short version of the smartphone addiction scale: Measurement invariance across gender

“…Measurement invariance testing is often performed through an iterative process. A series of increasingly restrictive confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) models determine the extent to which measurement parameters (loadings and intercepts) are equivalent across different samples or time points [ 40 , 45 , 46 ]. Associations between manifest indicators and latent constructs, such as regression intercepts, factor loadings and residual (error/uniqueness) variances, are involved.…”

Estrés de las minorías sexuales y su impacto en la salud mental de las personas LGB+

“…El único artículo que se ha encontrado al respecto aborda la sensibilidad al rechazo de manera general, sin centrarse en aquella específica de las minorías sexuales, y con población de cualquier orientación sexual. En este caso, se observó que las mujeres y las personas con una orientación sexual minoritaria presentaban niveles más altos de sensibilidad al rechazo, en comparación a los hombres y las personas heterosexuales, respectivamente (Maiolatesi et al, 2022). Dado que la sensibilidad al rechazo va ligada a situaciones pasadas de discriminación (Feinstein, 2020), si tenemos en cuenta que los hombres y las personas homosexuales son los dos grupos de población que más experiencias de victimización presentan (Bostwick et al, 2014;Colledge et al, 2015;Moyano & Sánchez-Fuentes, 2020;Rice et al, 2021), podría esperarse que también fueran los que mayores niveles de sensibilidad al rechazo mostraran.…”