For individuals high in Rejection Sensitivity (RS), a learned orientation to anxiously expect rejection from valued others, negative feedback from social sources may disrupt engagement with learning opportunities, impeding recovery from mistakes. One context in which this disruption may be particularly pronounced is among women high in RS following evaluation by a male in authority. To investigate this prediction, 40 college students (50% female) answered general knowledge questions followed by immediate performance feedback and the correct answer while we recorded event-related potentials. Error correction was measured with a subsequent surprise retest. Performance feedback was either nonsocial (asterisk/tone) or social (male professor's face/voice). Attention and learning were indexed respectively by the anterior frontal P3a (attentional orienting) and a set of negative-going waveforms over left inferior-posterior regions associated with successful encoding. For women, but not men, higher RS scores predicted poorer error correction in the social condition. A path analysis suggested that, for women, high RS disrupted attentional orienting to the social-evaluative performance feedback, which affected subsequent memory for the correct answer by reducing engagement with learning opportunities. These results suggest a mechanism for how social feedback may impede learning among women who are high in RS.
Keywords: Attention; FRN; LERN; P3a; memory.