420 Iv. COGNITI vE AND M OTIvATIONAL P ROCESSES
dance at review sessions, and grade point av -
erage, above and beyond RS-  personal.
Although there is some overlap in the re -
actions and outcomes to rejection that are 
associated with RS-  status and RS-  personal, 
as reviewed earlier, there are also notable 
differences. For example, RS-  personal is re -
liably associated with low self-  esteem; how -
ever, RS-race among African Americans is 
not associated with self-  esteem (Mendoza- 
Denton et al., 2002). This finding is in line 
with predictions in research on the self- 
protective properties of stigma (see Crocker 
& Major, 1989). More specifically, Crock -
er and Major found that among targets of 
stigma, discrimination does not affect self- 
esteem, because targets attribute this out -
come to the perpetrator rather than to the 
self (i.e., “It’s not my fault”; Major, Kaiser, 
& McCoy, 2003). Consistent with this logic, 
RS-race has been found to be unrelated to 
self- esteem among African Americans.
In addition to such differences between 
RS- personal and RS-race for African Ameri -
cans, the nature of people’s reactions to per -
ceived rejection also differs among different 
RS- status dynamics, because these reactions 
can partly have their roots in one’s cultural 
upbringing and are therefore group specific. 
In this regard, the case of RS-race among 
Asian Americans provides a useful contrast 
with RS-race for African Americans. Specifi -
cally, RS-race among Asian Americans is un -
related to academic outcomes, yet it is nega -
tively related to self-  esteem. This interesting 
pattern suggests that not all stigmas are cre -
ated equal, and that the protective qualities of 
stigma—  the ability to recognize that it’s not 
one’s fault—does not happen automatically. 
As Chan and Mendoza-  Denton (2008) argue, 
the Civil Rights movement precipitated a cul -
tural shift in which attributions of responsi -
bility for discrimination toward perpetrators 
became part of a cultural narrative for Afri -
can Americans, whereas Asian Americans 
have not benefited to such a large extent from 
such a social movement. Again, these patterns 
serve to underscore the interaction of the per -
sonality system with the social and historical 
context in which the person develops. One of 
the features of the CAPS system is that goals, 
values, expectations, and beliefs, by their very 
nature, are dependent and inherently interac -
tive within the context of the environment.Interactions between  Status‑Based RS 
and Moderating  Variables
As articulated in the CAPS model and illus -
trated earlier through RS, personality dy -
namics do not exist in a vacuum; rather, they 
interact with other CAUs in the system, as 
well as other environmental inputs, to pro -
duce changes to the behavioral outcomes ob -
served. In the same way that self-  regulatory 
competencies moderate the link between RS- 
personal and negative outcomes such as ag -
gression or relationship failures, researchers 
have also explored interactive relationships 
between different types of status-  based RS 
and other individual-  difference variables.
In the domain of RS-race, one interest -
ing moderation involves the person’s degree 
of ethnic identification. The literature on 
ethnic identity and academic outcomes has 
been mixed, with some scholars suggesting 
that a strong minority-  group identity should 
be disruptive for academic performance, be -
cause it develops as an “oppositional iden -
tity” to an academic identity (e.g., Ogbu, 
1978, 1991), while other scholars note that 
ethnic identity serves as a protective factor 
because it provides students with a source of 
strength, purpose, and history upon which 
to build their studies. Mendoza-  Denton, 
 Pietrzak, and Downey (2008) hypothesized 
that these two patterns could be reconciled 
in the literature by taking race-based rejec -
tion sensitivity into account. The researchers 
reasoned that when a person expects rejec -
tion because of their ethnicity or race in a 
particular academic context (as indexed by 
high levels of RS-race), holding a strong eth -
nic identity should in fact be incompatible 
with an academic identity, yielding these 
two identities oppositional. However, when 
a person has calm acceptance expectations 
for his or her ethnic identity (i.e., low RS-
race), the ethnic and academic identities 
should be able to flourish together, and eth -
nic identity should then provide an academic 
boost. This is exactly what the researchers 
observed: Participants who were high in eth -
nic identity had different academic outcomes 
as a function of RS-race, with those lower in 
RS-race faring significantly better than their 
counterparts who were higher in RS-race.
Another finding that illustrates how RS 
interacts with other CAUs in the system is 