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Romantic feedbacks influence self-relevant processing: the moderating effects of sex difference and facial attractiveness

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Abstract

Previous works have shown that social rejection influences self-relevant processing. However, it remains unclear how romantic rejection influences self-relevant processing. In addition, men and women show different mate preferences, and facial attractiveness plays an important role in mate selection. The current study investigated how romantic feedbacks influence self-relevant processing and how sex difference and facial attractiveness moderate this process. After receiving social feedback of rejection or acceptance from 30 opposite-sex individuals, 51 men and 54 women completed the label–shape pair trials in which they judged whether shapes (triangle, circle, square) and labels (“self,” “friend,” “stranger”) were matched or mismatched. The results showed that romantic rejection inhibited women’s self-processing advantage by improving their response accuracy for matching the friend-label, which was positively associated with their score for perceived social support. By contrast, men rejected by women with high facial attractiveness improved their response accuracy for matching the self-label. Women improved their response accuracy for matching the friend-label not only when rejected by men with high facial attractiveness but also when accepted by men with low facial attractiveness. The results indicate that sex difference and facial attractiveness together moderate the influence of romantic feedback on self-relevant processing, which may be associated with sex differences in mating preferences and response to social threat.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31700981).

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The software package E-prime 2.0 was used to present the stimuli and collect the data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Northeast Normal University, 5268 Renmin Street, ChangChun, Jilin, 130024, China

    Yang Xu, Yuan Yuan, Xiaochun Xie, Hui Tan & Lili Guan

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  1. Yang Xu
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  3. Xiaochun Xie
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  4. Hui Tan
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  5. Lili Guan
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Yang Xu, Yuan Yuan, Xiaochun Xie and Hui Tan. The first draft of manuscript was written by Yang Xu and Lili Guan. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Lili Guan.

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Ethical board approval was obtained from Northeast Normal University. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Xu, Y., Yuan, Y., Xie, X. et al. Romantic feedbacks influence self-relevant processing: the moderating effects of sex difference and facial attractiveness. Curr Psychol 41, 4145–4157 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02114-7

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