Rejection sensitivity as a mechanism linking childhood maltreatment and peer rejection to adolescent dating violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adolescent dating violence is a growing public health concern that threatens youth well-being worldwide. Early exposure to invalidating environments, such as parental maltreatment and peer rejection, can foster patterns of violence in later romantic relationships. Drawing on developmental theories of attachment and social learning, we synthesize evidence linking these adverse early experiences to dating violence. Specifically, we examine how maltreatment distorts attachment security and models aggression as a relational tool, and how peer rejection compounds these effects by normalizing hostility and impairing emotion regulation. We propose that rejection sensitivity is a central mechanism linking early invalidating relationships to adolescent dating violence. Findings underscore the need for prevention programs addressing both family and peer contexts of violence. • Early experiences of maltreatment or peer rejection can set the stage for later relational violence, often emerging within romantic relationships during adolescence. • If individuals experience punitive, invalidating, or hostile interpersonal relationships in childhood, they may develop maladaptive expectations about what constitutes normal or acceptable behavior in romantic relationships during adolescence. • Experiencing rejection from both parents and peers has been linked to heightened rejection sensitivity which increases vulnerability to mental health difficulties and violence within adolescent romantic relationships. • Childhood maltreatment can distort attachment security and normalize coercion as a means of regulating closeness, while peer rejection compounds these vulnerabilities by undermining belonging and reinforcing hostile social expectations. These experiences foster heightened rejection sensitivity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".