418 Iv. COGNITI vE AND M OTIvATIONAL P ROCESSES
as children and were indistinguishable from 
low-RS adults. In a subset of these same in -
dividuals followed a decade later, preschool 
delay ability again served as a protective 
factor against vulnerability to borderline 
personality disorder (Ayduk, Zayas, et al., 
2008), a core feature of which involves 
overreactivity to real or imagined rejection. 
Similar moderation effects of delay of grati -
fication on negative academic and social 
outcomes associated with high RS have been 
found in a sample of ethnically diverse, low 
socioeconomic status middle school children 
(Ayduk et al., 2000, Study 2).
Research suggests that self-  regulatory 
competencies may buffer against the negative 
outcomes associated with high RS through 
attentional mechanisms. As we summarized 
earlier, high-RS individuals exhibit an at -
tentional bias toward rejection stimuli. Be -
renson and colleagues (2009) demonstrated 
that when faced with rejection cues, high-
RS individuals are impaired in their abil -
ity to complete competing tasks. However, 
high-RS individuals’ tendency toward such 
attentional bias was lower if they had dem -
onstrated an ability to engage in cognitive 
control in an earlier task (Ayduk & Gyurak, 
2008). Such cognitive control—  the ability 
to inhibit habitual, prepotent responses— 
was negatively associated with verbal ag -
gression toward romantic partners among 
high-RS individuals. Also consistent with 
this line of reasoning, Gyurak and Ayduk 
(2007) showed that attentional control sig -
nificantly attenuates the potentiation of the 
startle reflex in people with low self-  esteem, 
who tend to be high in RS. This finding sug -
gests that self-  regulatory competencies can 
alter the trajectory of the high-RS dynamic 
at a relatively early stage of processing, by 
attenuating the activation of the defensive 
motivational system.
In short, a substantial body of work has 
started to address the question of how other 
CAUs in the CAPS system might interact 
with the RS dynamic. To date, this work 
has focused primarily on of self-  regulatory 
competencies, demonstrating that attention 
control and the ability to self-  regulate in 
the service of long-term goals buffer against 
the maladaptive outcomes associated with 
high RS. Given that self-  control and self- 
regulation broadly construed maps onto the conscientiousness dimension of the Big 
Five (e.g., John & Srivastava, 1999; Bogg & 
Roberts, 2004), these findings can be inter -
preted as evidence showing that the high-RS 
dynamic may play itself out very differently 
depending on one’s level of conscientious -
ness. There are, of course, many other pos -
sible moderators of RS, including other Big 
Five traits, such as agreeableness or open- 
mindedness (neither of which strongly cor -
relate with RS). These and other such inter -
esting questions await future research.
Status -Based RS
A growing literature recognizes that individ -
uals can be rejected and experience the psy -
chological sequelae of such rejection on the 
basis of not only their personal characteris -
tics but also the characteristics they share 
with others, such as race, gender, religion, or 
sexual orientation. This is broadly referred 
to as status-  based rejection sensitivity (RS- 
status; Mendoza-  Denton, et al., 2002). RS- 
status manifests itself as sensitivity to rejec -
tion in a domain-  specific manner based on 
the status characteristic. As such, to date it 
has been studied in the context of race (for 
African Americans and Asian Americans), 
gender, social class, sexual orientation, age, 
and immigrant status. Although the gen -
eral cascade of each dynamic also consists 
of anxious expectations, ready perceptions, 
and intense reactions, the trigger situations 
and outcomes differ, revealing the strong 
influence of the environment in shaping the 
dynamic itself. In what follows, we selec -
tively review research findings on RS-  status 
to illustrate this point, focusing primarily on 
race-based RS as an example of RS-  status.
Trigger  Situations:  
The Ifs of the RS‑Status Dynamics
Mendoza-  Denton and colleagues (2002) 
proposed the construct of race-based rejec -
tion sensitivity  (RS-race) as an individual 
difference construct to help explain minor -
ity individuals’ anticipation and reaction to 
discrimination, exclusion, and mistreatment 
on the basis of their race. They found that 
the kinds of situations that trigger RS-race 
among African Americans are distinct from 