Mark Leary

Duke University | DU · Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

A great deal of human behavior is motivated by the desire for acceptance and belonging, and a high proportion of people's emotional reactions stems from concerns with actual or potential social rejection. The pervasive quest for acceptance can be seen in the attention and effort people devote to their physical appearance, their efforts to be liked,...

Changes in depressive symptoms in response to the experience of a first high-impact stressor (i.e., a stressor rated as both very upsetting and very disruptive) in college were examined as an indicator of student resilience. Participants were 953 college undergraduates from four institutions participating in a larger longitudinal study of student r...

Looking back through the research I have conducted on the need to belong, I discovered three unpublished projects that might be of interest . At the time, each of these projects needed follow-up work to replicate findings and resolve fuzziness in their results, yet each addressed unexplored questions, generated useful findings, and offers direction...

This chapter critically examines psychological conceptualizations of humility and offers a novel integrative perspective that identifies the central psychological feature of humility. The gist of this approach is that, at its core, humility involves the recognition that, however great one’s personal accomplishments or positive characteristics may b...

Two studies tested the hypothesis that humility is characterized by the belief that, no matter how extraordinary one’s accomplishments or characteristics may be, one is not entitled to be treated special because of them (hypo-egoic nonentitlement). Participants identified either one (Study 1) or five (Study 2) positive accomplishments or characteri...

This book is about the ways which human behavior is affected concerns with people may be doing, their public impressions they typically prefer that No matter what else other people perceive them in certain desired ways and not perceive them in other, undesired ways. Put simply, human beings have a pervasive and ongoing concern with their self-prese...

People feel more authentic at certain times than at others, and people differ in how authentic they believe they are overall. Although self-judgments of authenticity and inauthenticity are important to people, we know little about factors that influence people’s inferences about or reactions to their authenticity. Three studies examined beliefs abo...

Self-compassion is consistently associated with psychological well-being, but most research has examined their relationship at only a single point in time. This study employed a longitudinal design to investigate the relationship between baseline self-compassion, perceived stress, and psychological outcomes in college students (n = 462) when the ou...

As the term is typically used, authenticity refers to the degree to which a particular behavior is congruent with a person’s attitudes, beliefs, values, motives, and other dispositions. However, researchers disagree regarding the best way to conceptualize and measure authenticity, whether being authentic is always desirable, why people are motivate...

Research on the structure of personality has identified a sixth major trait that emerges in addition to the Big Five. This factor has been characterized in a number of ways—as integrity, morality, trustworthiness, honesty, values, and, most commonly, honesty-humility. Although each of these labels captures some of the attributes associated with the...

A variety of philosophical, religious, spiritual, and scientific perspectives converge on the notion that everything that exists is part of some fundamental entity, substance, or process. People differ in the degree to which they believe that everything is one, but we know little about the psychological or social implications of holding this belief...

Although many studies have examined the short-term effects of rejection in laboratory settings, few have investigated the impact of rejection over time or in real-world contexts. The university sorority recruitment process offers a unique opportunity to address these shortcomings. Women participating in sorority recruitment were surveyed directly b...

Four studies examined intellectual humility—the degree to which people recognize that their beliefs might be wrong. Using a new Intellectual Humility (IH) Scale, Study 1 showed that intellectual humility was associated with variables related to openness, curiosity, tolerance of ambiguity, and low dogmatism. Study 2 revealed that participants high i...

Social Signal Processing is the first book to cover all aspects of the modeling, automated detection, analysis, and synthesis of nonverbal behavior in human-human and human-machine interactions. Authoritative surveys address conceptual foundations, machine analysis and synthesis of social signal processing, and applications. Foundational topics inc...

First-ever edited volume dedicated to hypo-egoic phenomena. Offers cutting-edge investigations into a variety of hypo-egoic phenomena that collectively have widespread implications for personal, social, and societal welfare. Features multi-disciplinary scholarship and contemporary research. Includes chapters authored by widely known, well-respected...

People regularly monitor and control the impressions others form of them but differ in the degree to which they both convey impressions that are consistent with their private self-views (self-presentational congruence) and present different images of themselves to different targets (self-presentational variability). This study examined the implicat...

This study examined the relationship between recognition memory and intellectual humility, the degree to which people recognize that their personal beliefs are fallible. Participants completed the General Intellectual Humility Scale, an incidental old/new recognition task, and a task that assessed the tendency to over-claim one's knowledge. Signal...

Although significant progress has been made in the conceptualization and measurement of intellectual humility, little is known about intellectual humility with respect to specific opinions, beliefs, and positions. We offer a conceptualization of specific intellectual humility and present three studies that examine its key tenets. Study 1 developed...

Although self-compassion is associated with positive emotions, resilience, and well-being, some people resist recommendations to treat themselves with kindness and compassion. This study investigated how people’s personal values and evaluations of self-compassionate behaviors relate to their level of self-compassion. After completing measures of tr...

Two studies tested whether people are biased to infer that their positive actions are more authentic than their negative actions. In Study 1, participants identified a positive or negative personal characteristic and assessed the authenticity of past behavior that reflected that characteristic. In Study 2, people imagined themselves performing posi...

People differ in the degree to which they are attuned to other people's evaluations of them, are motivated to make desired impressions on others, experience distress when their public images are damaged or others' evaluations of them are unfavorable, and use various tactics to convey public impressions of themselves to others. This chapter focuses...

A great deal of human emotion arises in response to real, anticipated, remembered, or imagined rejection by other people. Because acceptance by other people improved evolutionary fitness, human beings developed biopsychological mechanisms to apprise them of threats to acceptance and belonging, along with emotional systems to deal with threats to ac...

People sometimes display strong emotional reactions to events that appear disproportionate to the tangible magnitude of the event. Although previous work has addressed the role that perceived disrespect and unfairness have on such reactions, this study examined the role of perceived social exchange rule violations more broadly. Participants (n = 17...

Many psychological phenomena have been explained primarily in terms of intrapsychic motives to maintain particular cognitive or affective states-such as motives for consistency, self-esteem, and authenticity-whereas other phenomena have been explained in terms of interpersonal motives to obtain tangible resources, reactions, or outcomes from other...

After committing an error or transgression, people may experience shame (they feel badly about themselves) or guilt (they feel badly about their action or inaction). This study investigated the possibility that people experience more shame in domains that are relevant to their self-concept and that shame in these domains is more strongly associated...

This study examined belief superiority—the belief that one’s own beliefs are more correct than other viewpoints—in the domain of environmental and energy issues. Replicating research in other domains, attitude extremity on seven energy issues was associated with belief superiority about those viewpoints. Consequences of belief superiority were also...

This study introduces the construct of sociotropic differentiation – the figurative array of people whose acceptance and rejection matter to a person – and examines whether differences in sociotropic differentiation predict social and emotional well-being during the transition to college. A total of 104 freshmen (40% men) participated in a two-wave...

This chapter focuses on the ways in which people seek status in their interpersonal interactions and relationships. Our analysis conceptualizes status as the degree to which other people perceive that an individual possesses resources or personal characteristics that are important for the attainment of collective goals. That is, people have status...

The present study examined how feedback regarding one's personal impact on the environment, along with feedback regarding one's group's impact, influences environmental attitudes, intentions, and self-beliefs. Using a bogus carbon footprint calculator, participants received either moderately or highly negative feedback about their own environmental...

Accusations of entrenched political partisanship have been launched against both conservatives and liberals. But is feeling superior about one's beliefs a partisan issue? Two competing hypotheses exist: the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis (i.e., conservatives are dogmatic) and the ideological-extremism hypothesis (i.e., extreme views on both sides...

Nine studies examined the construct validity of the Need to Belong Scale. The desire for acceptance and belonging correlated with, but was distinct from, variables that involve a desire for social contact, such as extraversion and affiliation motivation. Furthermore, need to belong scores were not related to insecure attachment or unfulfilled needs...

Four studies investigated the relationship between self-compassion, health behaviors, and reactions to illness. Participants completed measures of self-compassion, health-related thoughts and feelings, reactions to actual and hypothetical illnesses, and self-regulation. Study 1 revealed that self-compassion was related to health-related cognitions...

Abstract The objective of this study was to extend the psychometric evaluation of a brief version of the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS). A secondary analysis of data from an international sample of 1967 English-speaking persons living with HIV disease was used to examine the factor structure, and reliability of the 12-item Brief Version Self-Compassio...

Purpose: Evidence suggests that self-compassion may be beneficial to older adults who are struggling to cope with the aging process. The purpose of this study was to assess the thoughts of self-compassionate older adults and to determine whether self-compassionate thoughts relate to positive responses to aging. Design and methods: Participants (...

To test the hypothesis that self-compassion buffers people against the emotional impact of illness and is associated with medical adherence, 187 HIV-infected individuals completed a measure of self-compassion and answered questions about their emotional and behavioral reactions to living with HIV. Self-compassion was related to better adjustment, i...

Blushing is the uncontrollable experience of warmth, usually accompanied by reddening of the skin, on the face, neck, ears and upper chest that people sometimes experience in reaction to real or perceived evaluation or social attention. Physiologically, blushing reflects the vasodilatation of cutaneous blood vessels in the blush region. Dilation of...

Reviews work on the role of social emotions in the way that people think about themselves and their relationships with others. The author provides a theoretical framework for understanding the reciprocal effects of interpersonal emotions, social cognitions, and self-relevant thoughts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Two studies assessed the role of self-compassion as a moderator of the relationship between physical health and subjective well-being in the elderly. In Study 1, 132 participants, ranging in age from 67 to 90 years, completed a questionnaire that assessed their perceptions of their physical health, self-compassion, and subjective well-being. Partic...

People differ regarding their "Big Three" mate preferences of attractiveness, status, and interpersonal warmth. We explain these differences by linking them to the "Big Two" personality dimensions of agency/competence and communion/warmth. The similarity-attracts hypothesis predicts that people high in agency prefer attractiveness and status in mat...

Can negative first names cause interpersonal neglect? Study 1 (N = 968) compared extremely negatively named online-daters with extremely positively named online-daters. Study 2 (N = 4,070) compared less extreme groups—namely, online-daters with somewhat unattractive versus somewhat attractive first names. Study 3 (N = 6,775) compared online-daters...

People often perceive products that cost more as having higher quality. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the effect of price on perceived quality is attenuated when people believe that their judgments of product quality will be shared with other people. Shoppers rated wines that they thought sold for a low or high price, believing that th...

Life transitions that include moving to a new location are stressful, particularly if difficulties arise in the new environment. This study focused on the role of self-compassion in moderating students' reactions to social and academic difficulties in the transition to college. Before starting college, 119 students completed a measure of self-compa...

Rejection is classified as actual, expected, and perceived. It can be implicitly felt through behavioral patterns or can be directly brought into play by way of verbal communication and removal of membership from an organization. No matter what kind of observed low relational evaluation takes place, this scenario still leads to depression, sadness,...

In this chapter, we first consider the historical and conceptual roots of the tripartite, but at times rocky, marriage of the fields of personality, social, and abnormal psychology. After briefly describing the hopes of early 20th-century scholars to array the study of normal and abnormal behavior, thought, and feeling on the same conceptual contin...

Non-acceptance can be perceived as inadequate relationship value towards an individual. By nature, human beings try to find a sense of belongingness and fear any form of denunciation. This chapter recognizes the fact that not everyone is expected to like and to be liked by everyone else, but even with minimal amount, acceptance is sought for. Inevi...

Interpersonal rejection ranks among the most potent and distressing events that people experience. Romantic refusal, ostracism, betrayal, stigmatization, job termination, and other kinds of denial have the power to compromise the quality of people's lives. As a result, individuals are highly motivated to avoid social rejection, and, indeed, much of...

Self-compassion entails qualities such as kindness and understanding toward oneself in difficult circumstances and may influence adjustment to persistent pain. Self-compassion may be a particularly influential factor in pain adjustment for obese individuals who suffer from persistent pain, as they often experience heightened levels of pain and lowe...

Self-compassion—treating oneself with kindness, care, and concern in the face of negative life events—may promote the successful self-regulation of health-related behaviors. Self-compassion can promote self-regulation by lowering defensiveness, reducing the emotional states and self-blame that interfere with self-regulation, and increasing complian...

Individual differences in affect intensity are typically assessed with the Affect Intensity Measure (AIM). Previous factor analyses suggest that the AIM is comprised of four weakly correlated factors: Positive Affectivity, Negative Reactivity, Negative Intensity and Positive Intensity or Serenity. However, little data exist to show whether its four...

Most research on self-presentation has examined how people convey images of themselves on only 1 or 2 dimensions at a time. In everyday interactions, however, people often manage their impressions on several image-relevant dimensions simultaneously. By examining people's self-presentations to several targets across multiple dimensions, these 2 stud...

Over the past 50 years, research on self-presentation has revealed a great deal about how people construct social images by managing the impressions that others form of them. However, inspection of the dominant research paradigms reveals that most researchers have not addressed central features of self-presentation as they occur in everyday life. U...

This article examines self-relevant processes that sustain behaviors that have little or no direct implications for people’s well-being. When outcomes are low in direct personal relevance, far in the future, or only weakly linked to one’s present behavior, imagined personal incentives may not be enough to motivate behavior. Under such circumstances...

On the basis of the importance of social connection for survival, humans may have evolved a "sociometer"-a mechanism that translates perceptions of rejection or acceptance into state self-esteem. Here, we explored the neural underpinnings of the sociometer by examining whether neural regions responsive to rejection or acceptance were associated wit...

Many phenomena of interest to positive psychology share a common feature that involves a particular pattern of self-relevant cognitive activity. This hypo-egoic state is responsible both for the sense of well-being that tends to accompany many positive psychological experiences (such as flow, meditation, and transcendence) and for prosocial beliefs...

Although several explanations of social anxiety exist, most of them emphasize one of three sets of antecedents: biological mechanisms involving temperamental, genetic, psychophysiological, and evolutionary factors; cognitive patterns in how people think about themselves and their social worlds; and interpersonal processes that occur in the context...

This article examines the role that personality variables and processes play in people's efforts to manage their public images. Although most research on self-presentation has focused on situational influences, people differ greatly in the degree to which they care about others' impressions of them, the types of impressions they try to convey, and...

Self-presentation has been shown to play a role in the performance of a variety of potentially health-damaging behaviors such as substance abuse, exercise avoidance, failing to wear protective sports equipment, and failing to seek medical treatment (Leary, Tchividjian, & Kraxberger, 199437. Leary , M. R. , Tchividjian , L. R. and Kraxberger , B. E....

Affiliation2Seeking Acceptance and Belonging3Monitoring Relational Value and Social Connections4Varieties of Rejection-Related Events5Reactions to Rejection6Dealing With Threats to Affiliation, Acceptance, and Belonging7Long-Term Consequences of Rejection8Summary

This research assessed the role of perceived selfishness in people's reactions to events without tangible consequences. In Experiment 1, participants were assigned to complete a boring task by another person who gave a selfish, legitimizing, or exculpatory explanation for the decision. However, half of the participants knew that the other's decisio...

People who are high in self-compassion treat themselves with kindness and concern when they experience negative events. The present article examines the construct of self-compassion from the standpoint of research on coping in an effort to understand the ways in which people who are high in self-compassion cope with stressful events. Self-compassio...

The Benefits of Reducing Self-awareness and Conscious ControlHypo-egoic Self-RegulationDecreasing Self-awarenessLowering Abstract and Evaluative Self-thoughtConclusions References

Although widely invoked as an explanation for psychological phenomena, ego threat has been conceptualized and induced in a variety of ways. Most contemporary research conceptualizes ego threat as a threat to a person's self-image or self-esteem, but experimental operationalizations of ego threat usually confound threats to self-esteem with threats...

This article describes a new model that provides a framework for understanding people's reactions to threats to social acceptance and belonging as they occur in the context of diverse phenomena such as rejection, discrimination, ostracism, betrayal, and stigmatization. People's immediate reactions are quite similar across different forms of rejecti...

The analogue-I and analogue-me refer to mental self-relevant images that take a first-person vs. third-person perspective, respectively. Mental self-analogues are essential for goal setting, planning, and rehearsal of behavioral strategies, but they often fuel emotional and interpersonal problems when people react to their analogue selves as if the...

This study reports data on the relationship of heart rate and blood pressure to state and trait social anxiety. Findings support the prediction that high trait anxiety subjects evidence a correlation between physiological measures and social anxiety. Measures of heart rate in both resting and talking periods correlate with state anxiety among high...

A prevailing question in the study of emotion has involved the number and identity of human emotions. Theorists have sliced the emotional pie in a variety of ways, but most fall into one of two camps. Advocates of categorical approaches have identified a relatively small number of “basic” emotions – such as anger, fear, joy, sadness, disgust, and s...

Philosophical and scientific discussions suggest the presence of a fourth category of self-construal that has received little attention from researchers. In addition to defining themselves in terms of their unique traits, social relationships, and group memberships, some people's self-concepts include broader categories of people, animals, and inan...

This study investigated the possibility that inducing a state of self-compassion would attenuate the tendency for restrained eaters to overeat after eating an unhealthy food preload (the disinhibition effect). College women completed measures of two components of rigid restrained eating: restrictive eating (desire and effort to avoid eating unhealt...