 19. Cognitive–Affective Processes in Rejection Sensitivity  419
those that trigger RS based on one’s person -
al characteristics. Examples might include 
walking down the street and seeing someone 
clutch their belongings a little more tightly, 
or being followed around a store. In other 
words, while the “active ingredients” of RS- 
personal involve the possibility of rejection 
or abandonment from significant others, for 
RS-race, these “active ingredients” involve 
the specter of discrimination or stigmatiza -
tion.
Furthermore, these “active ingredients” 
may further differ as a function of the spe -
cific identity group that faces the threat of 
discrimination. For example, while a police 
stop may trigger legitimate expectations of 
mistreatment among African Americans and 
Latino/as in the United States, this situation 
is less likely to be a trigger for persons of 
Asian descent, because Asian Americans are 
not typically stereotyped as aggressive or 
criminal (although in particular local con -
texts, people of Asian descent may well be as -
sociated with dangerousness, leading people 
to expect rejection based on that stereotype). 
By contrast, the trigger features for RS-race 
among Asian Americans are quite different 
than those for African Americans; the active 
ingredients for Asian Americans include sus -
picions over being “unacculturated” (e.g., 
not fluent in English), “socially incompe -
tent,” “nerdy,” or “overly competitive” (see 
Cheryan & Monin, 2005), because these 
situations tap into the negatively valued as -
pects of the Asian stereotype. As another ex -
ample of the group specificity of trigger situ -
ations, interactions that require assumptions 
about knowledge in sports (e.g., knowledge 
about baseball) may be one of the triggers 
for rejection concerns among gay men, who 
are typically stereotyped as lacking interest 
in masculine enterprises (Pachankis et al., 
2008). Alternatively, for RS based on one’s 
social class (Rheinschmidt and Mendoza- 
Denton, 2014), any situation that makes 
one’s socioeconomic status (SES) public or 
salient may trigger rejection concerns.
Like the case of RS-  personal, the situa -
tion specificity of each RS-  status dynamic 
has implications for measurement, and the 
scenarios included in each RS questionnaires 
are tailored to the situational cues particu -
larly relevant to the social identity group the 
questionnaire is targeting. For example, the RS-race questionnaire for African Ameri -
cans includes scenarios such as “Imagine 
you have just finished shopping, and you are 
leaving the store carrying several bags. It’s 
closing time, and several people are filing 
out of the store at once. Suddenly, the alarm 
begins to sound, and a security guard comes 
over to investigate,” whereas the RS-race 
questionnaire for Asian Americans includes 
scenarios such as “You ask a salesperson at a 
store about a product, and she mumbles 0.62 
a response that you don’t catch. As you ask 
her to repeat what she just said.” Similarly, 
whereas the RS-gay questionnaire includes 
items such as “Some straight colleagues are 
talking about baseball. You force yourself to 
join the conversation but they dismiss your 
input,” the RS-class questionnaire includes 
scenarios such as “Imagine that you are in 
class having a discussion about living in dif -
ferent types of neighborhoods. Your neigh -
borhood comes up, but no one knows you 
live there.”
Consistent with the measurement of RS- 
personal, in all group-  specific RS-  status 
questionnaires, anxiety and expectations 
about rejection are assessed for each sce -
nario and averaged across scenarios. Thus, 
all RS questionnaires measure the degree to 
which individuals hold anxious expectations 
of rejection; however, they differ with re -
spect to the identity (e.g., personal vs. race) 
for which such rejection is expected.
Reactions to  Discrimination:  
The Thens of the RS‑Status Dynamics
As we have reviewed, RS-  personal is asso -
ciated with a host of negative interpersonal 
outcomes, including relationship difficulties, 
earlier and more frequent breakups, and re -
lationship dissatisfaction, as rejection con -
cerns interfere with the fulfillment of positive 
relationship goals. Among African Ameri -
can college students, Mendoza-  Denton et 
al. (2002) observed an analogous pattern in 
predominantly White educational settings 
(which lead minority students to question 
their belonging therein; Steele, 1997; Wal -
ton & Cohen, 2007). More specifically, in -
dividual differences in RS-race were shown 
to predict difficulties in the pursuit of these 
students’ academic goals, including degree 
of rapport with professors and peers, atten -