Fear of Rejection Erodes Life’s Meaning Through Two Hidden Pathways, Study Finds

For young adults navigating the turbulent waters of college life, few experiences sting as sharply as social rejection. A failed romantic overture, an unreturned message, an invitation that never comes—these moments can feel devastating to anyone, but for people high in rejection sensitivity, they carry an outsized emotional weight. Now, new research from China suggests that this anxious expectation of rejection does more than sour relationships. It appears to quietly drain something far more fundamental from students’ lives: their sense that life itself is meaningful.

The study, published in the journal Current Psychology by Xiaodi Niu, Yaxue Fan, Xueni Lin, and Yanan Liu of Zhengzhou University, set out to answer a question that has received surprisingly little empirical attention. Rejection sensitivity has been studied extensively in adolescents, where it has been linked to depression, aggression, and interpersonal difficulties. But college students, who sit at a critical developmental juncture, have drawn comparatively less scrutiny. According to Erik Erikson’s psychosocial theory, people in this stage are transitioning from adolescence into early adulthood, and their primary developmental task is to explore and establish intimate relationships—often while still wrestling with unresolved identity questions from the previous stage. How that task unfolds, the researchers argue, directly shapes whether young people experience their lives as meaningful.

Meaning in life is no trivial concern. Decades of research have tied it to better mental health, greater resilience, and even physical well-being. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in Health Psychology Review concluded that a meaningful life is a healthier life, and more recent work has linked meaning to protection against depression and suicidal ideation in young people. Conversely, when meaning collapses, the consequences can be severe. Understanding what builds or erodes meaning during the college years is therefore not an academic luxury but a matter of practical urgency for educators and mental health professionals.

The research team approached the problem in two complementary studies. The first adopted a cross-sectional design, surveying 450 Chinese college students with a battery of established psychological instruments: the Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire, the Relatedness Need Satisfaction Scale, the Authenticity Scale, and the Global Meaning Scale. This design allowed the researchers to map the relationships among these constructs at a single point in time and to test whether two candidate mechanisms—relatedness needs and authenticity—might carry the influence of rejection sensitivity onto meaning in life.

The second study added a dynamic dimension. Rather than relying solely on snapshots, the team used a daily diary method, tracking 100 college students over the course of one week. This approach, widely used in organizational and social psychology, lets researchers examine how experiences fluctuate within individuals from day to day, and whether the relationship between rejection sensitivity and meaning in life looks the same when measured as a stable trait and when measured as a moment-to-moment state. The distinction matters, because a disposition that colors a person’s life overall may operate differently from the fleeting feelings that rise and fall across a single week.

The findings were consistent across both studies. Among Chinese college students, rejection sensitivity negatively predicted meaning in life: the more anxiously students expected rejection, the less meaningful their lives felt. More importantly, the researchers found that this relationship was significantly mediated by two psychological mechanisms. The first was relatedness need satisfaction, a concept drawn from self-determination theory, the influential framework developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. According to that theory, humans have three basic psychological needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—and the satisfaction of these needs is essential for well-being. Prior work has shown that belonging itself enhances meaning: to belong is to matter, as one landmark study put it. The new findings suggest that rejection-sensitive students, who approach relationships with fear and defensive vigilance, may fail to satisfy their need for relatedness, and that this unmet need in turn hollows out their sense of meaning.

The second pathway ran through authenticity—the sense of being one’s true self rather than playing a role. This mechanism carries particular cultural resonance. In contexts shaped by strong relational norms, such as Chinese society, maintaining harmony in relationships can require considerable self-monitoring and, at times, the presentation of a socially expedient self. Earlier research has shown that adolescents who perceive low support from parents and peers engage in more false-self behavior, and that authenticity is closely tied to well-being and to meaning in life. A person who feels compelled to mask their true feelings to avoid rejection may achieve surface-level acceptance at the cost of inner congruence. The new study suggests that this trade-off is not cost-free: when rejection sensitivity pushes students to suppress or distort their authentic selves, their lives feel less meaningful as a result.

The theoretical architecture of the study draws on several converging strands of psychology. The meaning maintenance model holds that human beings are motivated to maintain coherent frameworks of meaning, and that threats to social bonds register as threats to that coherence. Research on existential mattering has argued that meaning judgments rest on a sense that one’s existence matters to others. Meanwhile, work on state authenticity has framed authenticity as a fit between the self and one’s environment, implying that environments rife with rejection cues make genuine self-expression feel unsafe. The Zhengzhou findings knit these threads together into a single causal story: rejection sensitivity poisons the relational soil in which both belonging and authenticity grow, and without those nutrients, meaning withers.

The cultural dimension of the work deserves emphasis. Relational mobility—the degree to which people are free to form and leave relationships—varies dramatically across societies, and prior research has shown that low relational mobility fosters greater sensitivity to social rejection. In societies where relationships are relatively stable and hard to replace, the stakes of any single rejection are higher, and the psychological cost of expecting rejection may be amplified. By focusing on Chinese college students, the study illuminates how these dynamics play out in a cultural context where interpersonal bonds carry particular weight, and where the developmental pressures of emerging adulthood intersect with collectivist relational norms.

The practical implications reach well beyond the laboratory. If relatedness needs and authenticity are the channels through which rejection sensitivity erodes meaning, then interventions targeting those channels could help. Campus counseling services might work with rejection-sensitive students not only to reframe their expectations of rejection but also to build genuinely satisfying connections and to practice expressing their true selves in relationships where it is safe to do so. Educators and residence-life staff can shape social environments that reduce the frequency and salience of rejection cues. And because meaning in life is itself a protective factor against depression and suicidal ideation, shoring it up during the college years may pay dividends across the lifespan. The authors report that the study received no external funding and was approved by the Behavioural Research Ethics Board of Zhengzhou University, with informed consent obtained from all participants. The survey datasets have been deposited in a public repository, allowing other researchers to scrutinize and extend the findings. As young adults worldwide continue to report rising loneliness and wavering purpose, this research offers a precise map of one route by which the fear of rejection quietly steals life’s meaning—and, crucially, points toward where that theft can be interrupted.

Subject of Research: The relationship between rejection sensitivity and meaning in life among Chinese college students, mediated by relatedness needs and authenticity

Article Title: The relationship between rejection sensitivity and meaning in life in Chinese college students: the mediating effects of relatedness needs and authenticity

Article References: Niu, X., Fan, Y., Lin, X., & Liu, Y. (2026). The relationship between rejection sensitivity and meaning in life in Chinese college students: the mediating effects of relatedness needs and authenticity. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1474. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10016-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10016-9

Keywords: rejection sensitivity, meaning in life, relatedness needs, authenticity, self-determination theory, Chinese college students, emerging adulthood, daily diary study, psychological needs, belonging, well-being, cross-cultural psychology