(PS6-41) Rejection sensitivity and daily associations with negative and positive affect in a clinical sample of sexual minority adolescents

Abstract Text: Sexual minority (SM) youth are at a greater risk of developing psychopathology compared to heterosexual youth. This increased vulnerability can be understood within the minority stress model, which posits that these disparities stem from unique stressors (i.e., minority stress) specific to their stigmatized identities. One significant internal and proximal minority stressor is rejection sensitivity (RS), which refers to the expectation of rejection related to one’s identity and the accompanying anxiety. Given that minority stressors are pervasive in SM adolescents’ everyday experiences, it is essential to examine how they affect emotional well-being on a daily level in real-world contexts. To date, research has focused predominantly on trait RS; the relation between state RS and mental health-related outcomes is understudied. There is a need to explore how RS relates to negative affectivity (NA) and positive affectivity (PA) in the daily lives of SM youth. This understanding may help identify intervention targets and reduce the risks associated with their marginalized experiences. This study is the first to leverage ecological momentary assessment to analyze RS and its daily associations with NA and PA in SM youth. The study involved 60 adolescents (M age = 15.13 years, SD age = 1.52 years; 82.54% assigned female at birth; 74.6% White) identifying as sexual minorities and recruited from a psychiatric inpatient unit. Participants reported their expectations of being rejected due to their identity and their worry about being rejected based on their identity, respectively, in daily morning surveys over 28 days following discharge from the inpatient unit. They also reported their levels of NA (lonely, stressed, mad, anxious, guilty, sad, scared) and PA (calm, excited, happy, satisfied, proud, hopeful) in signal contingent surveys five times daily over this period. Multilevel models indicated that RS (operationalized as a product of expectation and associated worry) was not prospectively associated with daily NA or PA. In examining components of RS separately, however, we found that worry about being rejected positively predicted daily NA (p < 0.01) but not PA, and expecting rejection did not predict NA or PA. Disentangling the components of RS revealed their distinct contributions to affect, suggesting that worry about rejection may be a more potent predictor of negative emotional experiences than expectation of rejection in SM youth at the daily level. This study highlights the importance of examining RS and affect at the state level, especially in SM individuals, to add to the growing research on their daily experiences. Future research should further investigate the temporal dynamics between RS and affect in minority youth, as well as explore how to mitigate worry about rejection to reduce negative affective outcomes in SM youth.