THAT'S MEN:As an adult it is hard to recall the teenage agonies involved in crossing a dance floor to ask a girl up or the awfulness of being turned down. But rejection is a feared and powerful human experience and never more so than in adolescence.
Psychologists trying to study the effects of rejection on teenagers have had to find ways to so without causing lasting harm. One method is to have the adolescents being studied play “cyberball” in which they think they are involved in a game with two other players tossing a virtual ball back and forth over the internet.
They don’t know that the game is being manipulated and can be programmed to exclude or include the adolescent in the exchange of the ball.
It may only be a game on the internet but adolescents report feeling “down” when they are excluded and they also report feeling high anxiety when left out. One study found that some adolescents even feel high anxiety when they are included. I wonder if this is due to a fear of not measuring up and of being rejected later?
The pain of rejection in adolescence is all the greater because the part of the brain which regulates painful emotional responses develops more slowly than the part which feels these painful emotions. Teenagers can fly off the handle easily because their brains have not yet developed to the point at which they can regulate their emotions as well as (most) adults.
A sense of rejection is one of the most distressing emotions in a variety of ways. It threatens four important needs: self-esteem, control, belonging and a sense of having a meaningful existence. In other words, you feel bad about yourself, that you have no control over what is happening to you, that you don’t belong and that life is meaningless. That’s a potent and sometimes fatal – through suicide – mix of feelings.
One study found that the negative feelings outlined above kick in even when the player knows that the game is controlled by a computer.
It is also common now to use MRI scans as part of these studies. Research findings by Catherine Sebastian, a lecturer in the department of psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London (published in the current issue of the Psychologist), highlight the situation of adolescents with autism spectrum conditions.
The research suggests that these adolescents have the same desire for acceptance as anyone else and feel the same pain at being rejected. Unfortunately, they are more likely to be bullied and rejected. She recommends that schools and others should be alert to the possibility of bullying of adolescents with autism conditions and that these individuals should be taught coping methods for dealing with social rejection.
For all teenagers, she makes the eminently sensible recommendation “that there should be a greater focus on training adolescents to regulate their emotions effectively, particularly within the social contexts”.
I suppose that back in the day the old religion classes taught emotion regulation in their own way. Regulating your feelings was seen, and taught, as a duty. Unfortunately, the validity of the emotional life seemed to be denied and that brought its own problems of repression and a major reluctance in those most affected to express how they felt.
Today, we need to put a new and more balanced emphasis on this very valuable skill. It’s a skill that could save lives.
PADRAIG O'MORAIN(pomorain@yahoo.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind - Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is available free by email.
