Department of Psychology.
Emotion. 2018 Jun;18(4):536-550. doi: 10.1037/emo0000366. Epub 2017 Sep 4.
According to the numbness hypothesis, rejection may not result in negative affect, but rather create several "nonvalenced" feelings, including feeling shocked, neutral, and numb. These feelings are hypothesized to lessen the extent to which people respond emotionally to various situations (emotional responsiveness). This project investigates (a) whether rejection produces these rarely assessed "nonvalenced" states, (b) to what extent these states are similar to one another and not negative, and (c) whether these states account for rejected individuals' lack of emotional responsiveness. In 3 experiments, participants experienced 3 different rejection manipulations. Participants reported their positive, negative, and "nonvalenced" feelings (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), and completed measures of emotional responsiveness (Experiments 2 and 3). A meta-analysis across the 3 experiments indicated that rejection increased negative affectivity, anger, hurt feelings, sadness, shock, and numbness, and decreased happiness, but did not significantly alter neutrality, positive affectivity, nor anxiety. In line with the view that these nonvalenced states are discriminable from each other, but in contrast with the numbness hypothesis, shock and numbness were positively correlated with negative affective states; whereas neutrality displayed weaker to null associations with them. Lastly, neither shock, neutrality, nor numbness mediated the link between rejection and emotional responding. In fact, increased negative and positive affect mediated the association between rejection and enhanced emotional responding. Overall, the data are inconsistent with the numbness hypothesis; albeit rejection produces shock and numbness, these 2 states are highly associated with increased negative affect and did not dampen emotional responsiveness. (PsycINFO Database Record
根据麻木假说，拒绝可能不会导致负面情绪，而是产生几种“无价值”的感觉，包括感到震惊、中立和麻木。这些感觉被假设可以减轻人们对各种情况的情绪反应程度（情绪反应性）。本项目调查了：（a）拒绝是否会产生这些很少被评估的“无价值”状态；（b）这些状态在多大程度上彼此相似而不是负面的；（c）这些状态是否解释了被拒绝个体缺乏情绪反应性的原因。在 3 项实验中，参与者经历了 3 种不同的拒绝操作。参与者报告了他们的积极、消极和“无价值”的感觉（实验 1、2 和 3），并完成了情绪反应性的测量（实验 2 和 3）。对这 3 项实验的元分析表明，拒绝增加了负性情绪、愤怒、伤害感、悲伤、震惊和麻木，并降低了幸福感，但对中立性、正性情绪或焦虑没有显著影响。与这些无价值状态彼此可区分的观点一致，但与麻木假说相反，震惊和麻木与负性情绪状态呈正相关；而中立性与它们的关联较弱或为零。最后，震惊、中立性和麻木都没有介导拒绝和情绪反应之间的联系。实际上，负性和正性情绪的增加介导了拒绝和增强的情绪反应之间的关联。总的来说，数据与麻木假说不一致；尽管拒绝会产生震惊和麻木，但这两种状态与增加的负性情绪高度相关，并没有抑制情绪反应性。
