Social Psychology Commons^™

Predicting The Psychological Health Of Older Adults: Interaction Of Age-Based Rejection Sensitivity And Discriminative Facility, Debbie Sau-King Chow, Evelyn Wing-Mun Au, Chi-Yue Chiu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

We hypothesize that older adults who anxiously expect, readily perceive, and intensely react to social rejection because of their old age (i.e., have high age-based rejection sensitivity) are vulnerable to depression and poor social functioning. We further hypothesize that the association between age-based rejection sensitivity and poor psychological health would be attenuated among older adults who possess adequate cognitive coping ability--they can discern and respond discriminatively to subtle variations in situational demands (i.e., have high discriminative facility). Based on the results of a focus group study, we constructed an age-based rejection sensitivity measure, which predicts greater depression, poorer social functioning, …