“No one likes me or wants to play with me!” Do highly sensitive adolescents feel peer acceptance and rejection more intensely?

Study background and aims

Peers play an important role in adolescents’ social lives. Children interact with peers every day and can experience both the highs, such as participating in group play, and the lows such as being excluded or rejected. For example, consider an 11-year-old who was rejected by peers, thinking, “No one likes me or wants to play with me!” Such a painful thought can have a profound impact.

Research and theory suggest that highly sensitive children are more strongly affected by their experiences, both positive and negative ones (1, 2, 3). However, it’s unclear whether this heightened sensitivity extends to peer interactions, such as acceptance or rejection by peers.

To explore this, we designed an experiment to simulate peer acceptance and rejection experiences and examined whether highly sensitive adolescents react more strongly to both types of peer experiences.

 

Study design and method

Our study (4) involved 1,207 Chinese adolescents (ages 8.75 to 15.17 years) who completed a paper questionnaire in their classrooms. First, participants completed the Chinese version of the 12-item Highly Sensitive Child Scale (5), which measures sensitivity with items like “I find it unpleasant to have a lot going on at once.” Subsequently they reported their current mood, noting both positive feelings, such as happiness, and negative ones, like sadness

Participants then read and imagined themselves in four distinct scenarios about everyday school interactions with peers. They were randomly assigned to either an acceptance or rejection condition, with each story beginning similarly but ending with either acceptance or rejection by peers. Examples include being either welcomed or rejected for a group project and overhearing classmates speaking about them either in a positive or negative way. After imagining these scenarios, participants rated their mood again, allowing for a comparison between their mood before and after completing the task. At the end, a “happy” story was presented to ensure participants left the experiment in a good mood.

Additionally, caregivers of a subset of 480 adolescents also reported on the adolescents’ sensitivity with items such as “My child finds it unpleasant to have a lot going on at once.”

 

Main findings

Did adolescents’ mood change after imagining being accepted or rejected by peers?

After the reading exercise, adolescents who imagined being accepted by peers showed an improvement in their mood. Conversely, adolescents who imagined being rejected experienced a worsened mood.

Did more sensitive adolescents react more strongly to imagined acceptance and rejection?

More sensitive adolescents reacted more strongly. In fact, the higher adolescents rated themselves on sensitivity, the better their mood after the acceptance imagination, and the worse their mood after the rejection imagination. However, these findings only emerged when using self-reported sensitivity and not with parent-reported sensitivity.

Why the discrepancy between self-reported and parent-reported sensitivity?

There may be two possible explanations. First, parents may not accurately observe adolescents’ sensitivity because adolescents increasingly seek independence from their parents, form social networks outside the family, and have secrets from parents (6, 7). Second, adolescents might not openly display their reactions to various experiences because they may have learned to deal with these experiences themselves, making their sensitivity less visible to parents.

 

General conclusions and implications

Our study showed that more sensitive adolescents not only react more strongly to peer rejection but also to peer acceptance. This finding supports the idea that being highly sensitive is associated with a greater response to both negative and positive experiences.

Our findings have practical implications for supporting adolescents in schools. They suggest that adolescents with higher levels of sensitivity may benefit more from classroom-based interventions promoting positive peer interactions and preventing negative peer interactions, or from interventions and counselling helping them cope with negative peer interactions.