Predicting the Psychological Health of Older Adults: Interaction of Age-Based Rejection Sensitivity and Discriminative Facility

• Main Authors: CHOW, Debbie Sau-King, AU, Evelyn Wing-Mun, CHIU, Chi-Yue
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2008
• Subjects: Older Adults; Rejection Sensitivity; Discriminative Facility; Family, Life Course, and Society; Social Psychology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/604; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/1603/viewcontent/1_s20_S0092656607000633_main.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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, greater loneliness, and lower life satisfaction among individuals in late adulthood. As hypothesized, the relationship between age-based rejection sensitivity and poor psychological health was weaker among older adults with high (vs. low) discriminative facility.