Rejection Sensitivity in Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Children

(teachyourkids.substack.com)

59 points | by actfrench 2 hours ago

14 comments

  • bonsai_spool 1 hour ago
    One should be careful with vibe-written / vibe-aided articles here. Who knows what is actually supported vs what sounded okay and the author (who is not a clinician) then signed off on.

    Even the core idea, 'rejection sensitivity' is acknowledged not to be a diagnostic entity: so then how can we make definitive comparisons? Maybe clinical gestalt... but the author is not trained to see and evalaute patients.

    • mobilejdral 1 hour ago
      100%, you can't have a section titled

      > Why It Happens: The Mechanics Underneath the Reaction

      And then don't talk about Mechanics, but instead no citations just guess. For anyone that actually wants something to go learn more about checkout the frequency of NCAH and the resulting blunted cortisol response as one thing that is influencing this.

      https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-024-06102-y#MOESM3 Plasmalogen, B5, 12-HETE, Androsterone sulfate, etc are all related to the functioning of the HPA-Axis.

      https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19598235/ <- CYP11B1 specifically here

      Anecdotally: I worked at a software company that had free snacks in the office kitchen and would always chuckle how the salt snacks would run out first. The connection being NCAH can result in less aldosterone which helps regulate salt in the body.

    • adamsb6 58 minutes ago
      Is this all that unusual for the field of education research?

      Vibe writing may be an improvement. I doubt frontier models would go along with whole language reading instruction without a tremendous amount of pushback.

      For those not in the know, a generation of children were taught to read sans phonics. They were told to do things like guess at words based on pictures or context clues. Some lessons had teachers covering words up and asking kids to use guessing strategies at what they might be.

    • alephnerd 38 minutes ago
      > One should be careful with vibe-written / vibe-aided articles here. Who knows what is actually supported vs what sounded okay and the author (who is not a clinician) then signed off on.

      The poster is SEOing their substack and product (modulo). All their posts are either related to their product, their product's substack, or talks related to their product.

      HN has been an SEO and content marketing target for years now, and existing HN moderation is increasingly failing to catch these attempts.

      Heck, a bot account for The Register reached 66K karma and was undetected until a couple of us complained.

    • RobotToaster 1 hour ago
      Rejection sensitivity dysphoria is an acknowledged trait of ADHD.
      • bonsai_spool 5 minutes ago
        I can't respond to your newest comment but essentially 'rejection sensitivity dysphoria' is not in the DSM-V, so to acknowledge it one needs to have both a definition and some reasonable experience with the diagnostic entity (i.e., it's not enough to read about a disease to be able to diagnose it).
      • giantg2 48 minutes ago
        That doesn't invalidate the parent's point. We can still question if the details and way it is presented is accurate.
        • RobotToaster 8 minutes ago
          I should've been clearer, I was replying to the "so then how can we make definitive comparisons" point.
  • hoppp 37 minutes ago
    "autistic individuals may have difficulty consciously processing social evaluative cues in the moment, meaning a child may not always recognize that what they are experiencing is a reaction to rejection, even while the physiological load of it is very real"

    Alexythemia is like a that, I can have anxiety without realizing it, all I see is that my hands are shaking, blood pressure rises but in the head I'm like whatever, I don't notice.

    However alexythemia also means no psychological reaction to physical emotion sensations.

    I would interpret this like some subconscious processing of social cues does occur in this case and it does trigger inner changes,but why it occurs does not make it into consciousness, so the alexythemia hides the reason for the body sensation but the sensation is strong enough to be noticeable and the lack of understanding for the strong reaction can cause people to flip out.

    I am not rejection sensitive at all btw, too dense to give a shit but its interesting.

  • ChrisMarshallNY 16 minutes ago
    Ugh. I'm not sure that I'm comfortable giving the sensitivity its own diagnoses. I feel as if it's a secondary reaction to a chronic condition.

    I'm "on the spectrum," which, of course, means that my K-12 days were a living hell. It was bad. I spent most of my early years, acting as a punching bag for any bully or proto-bully that was feeling the need to let off some steam.

    Needless to say, I tended to be a bit "sensitive," during that period.

    I also learned, early on, that I was absolutely terrible at determining motivation in others. I have learned to ask, explicitly, before assigning motive, so the sensitivity has extended far past my bully-magnet days.

    These days, I'm fairly old, and have developed highly effective compensation/coping mechanisms, but it took a long time to get here.

    All that, to say that, in my case, I feel as if the "sensitivity" was real, but as a secondary symptom of my "normal" autism lite.

  • TuckerBMorgan 25 minutes ago
    Only recently learned about RS, and it was one of those moments of seeing a lot of my past through a new lens
  • JSR_FDED 2 hours ago
    I recognize many of these behaviors from my childhood. Fortunately I’ve grown out of most of them. These ways of framing issues and feedback are very valuable, even in adult life.
  • cgio 1 hour ago
    An almost trifecta. I am almost gifted, autism and adhd ( or add, you wouldn’t call me hyperactive…). My trick was to “use” my autism to filter out rejection clues. I am still sensitive in a sense, can get obsessed over detail of something that could be perceived as a rejection, but I actively refuse parsing anything as such. People tell me I am over-confident to a fault.
    • notnaut 1 hour ago
      Very interesting. I’m in the same boat with a little more hyperactive and a little less autism. I never learned the filtering thing and I feel nearly as sensitive and doubtful as I did as a kid. It leaves me to dwell on everything and rarely make firm decisions, so I have the opposite problem.
    • notrealyme123 1 hour ago
      How do you use autism to filter something? Did you train this?
      • JonChesterfield 56 minutes ago
        That's the wrong baseline. If you start out oblivious that people are telling you things (with their expression, or with the noises they're making) you get that filter for free. The work is in _not_ filtering out such things. First you have to realise that's a thing (somehow? good luck with the bootstrap), then learn to pay attention, then try to make sense of the result.
    • willismichael 1 hour ago
      The "hyperactive" part of ADHD is kind of a misnomer, or at least doesn't mean hyperactive in the way that most people understand the word. Think of it more as a tendency to hyperfocus on specific things, often correlated with completely ignoring other things.
  • mannanj 10 minutes ago
    This article seems to have several humans below giving attention to AI generated output. I'd prefer not to give my attention to it, unless the author had been ethical and transparent and stated up front that was AI generated.
  • sssilver 1 hour ago
    Can someone explain whether these are physiological / chemical issues, or whether they are a matter of the things your brain "knows", your neural network, and therefore can be transformed by the power of thoughts?

    In other, more blunt terms, is this a "hardware" or a "software" issue?

  • fouc 5 minutes ago
    [delayed]
  • r_lee 2 hours ago
    the perfectionism and need for control is very true.

    I think with the rejection and criticism it's not so much about the actual criticism but the idea of what the other person now thinks/operates on, while they might gloss over it, you might assume the worst case scenario and think that now they're against you and you have to win them over again

    I'd say in general the concepts of "it's not a big deal" "it's probably nothing major" etc. don't seem to register

  • adaml_623 1 hour ago
    Did anybody know of good resources for this sort of thing in adults?
    • JonChesterfield 55 minutes ago
      Talking to software engineers about it has a pretty good hit rate for personal anecdotes.
  • 005019218290 2 hours ago
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  • hnacobsxph 2 hours ago
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  • braunjohnson 2 hours ago
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