When some teenage girls internalize rejection, it’s really in their heads

Everyone ruminates about the bad things that happen to them. Whether it’s a bad breakup, an embarrassing failure, or just a mean person, it can be hard to stop thinking about what happened and why. For people who ruminate too much, this negative thought pattern can lead to lasting mental health problems.

A research team led by the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, found that adolescent girls who have a greater tendency to ruminate show different patterns of brain activity when faced with social rejection. The study was published in December in the journal Cognitive neuroscience of development.

“Everyone experiences rejection, but not everyone experiences it in the same way,” said Amanda Guyer, associate director of the Center for Mind and Brain and professor of human ecology at UC Davis. “By identifying the brain processes that lead to differences in the tendency to ruminate, we can offer people better ways to avoid long-term damage.”

Experiencing rejection during a brain scan

The immediate experience of social rejection leaves distinct fingerprints on the brain that can be measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. This type of analysis can detect minute changes in blood flow and electrical activity in different parts of the brain. The wide range of what one feels and thinks is visible on a real-time fMRI.

In this study, 116 girls aged 16 to 19 participated in two tasks to measure their brain’s reaction to social rejection. During the first visit, participants were shown photos of 60 teenagers their age and were asked to select 30 with whom they would like to chat.

On the second visit, participants were placed in the fMRI scanner and told which of the teenagers in the photos wanted to chat with them and which did not. While under the fMRI scanner, the girls were also asked how these responses – and how being rejected by someone they had chosen on the first visit – made them feel. The data was collected from 2012 to 2014 and analyzed in 2023 when researchers applied new testing methods.

How negative emotions can encode one’s self-image

The fMRI showed that rejection increased activity in parts of the brain known to play a role in how we define who we are.

These parts of the brain are all active with increased blood flow and electrical activity when we think about ourselves or our emotional states, and when we retrieve our memories.

Being told that a peer didn’t want to chat with them was a form of social rejection, and this rejection showed up in the brain scans to varying degrees for each girl. However, girls who reported a tendency to ruminate had the highest activity during their brain scans.

“Our results suggest that girls who tend to ruminate experience more than just momentary sadness after rejection,” Guyer said. “They deeply internalize these negative comments into their self-image.”

These results show that unique processes in the brain are at play after rejection in girls with a high tendency to ruminate. This knowledge helps target interventions to treat rumination so that it doesn’t cause bigger problems later, Guyer said.

“Our study suggests that it can make a difference to reframe their negative experiences in a way that makes them feel better afterward rather than worse,” Guyer said.

Besides Guyer, other authors include Leehyun Yoon, also of UC Davis; Kate Keenan, University of Chicago, and Alison E. Hipwell and Erika E. Forbes, both of the University of Pittsburgh.