(PS2-26) Imposter Phenomenology, Rejection Sensitivity, and Reactions to Achievement and Social Failures

Imposter phenomenology was first identified by Clance & Imes (1978) to describe high achieving individuals who experience negative emotionality due to three key attributes: the sense of being a fraud,  fear of being discovered, and difficulty internalizing success while behaving in ways that maintain these beliefs (Leary et al., 2000).  Clinically, impostorism is important to understand as it has been correlated to depression (McGregor et al., 2008), anxiety (Parkman, 2016), and lower self-esteem (Rohrmann et al., 2016). Futher, imposterism has been identified to across age groups and professions, but disproportionately affects underrepresented individuals in industries or fields that are predominantly dominated by a more represented race or sex (Parkman, 2016; Clance & Imes, 1978). A similar phenomenon, rejection sensitivity describes individuals who are sensitive to interpersonal rejection (Gao et al., 2017). Consequently, because imposterism captures negative emotionality in the face of achievement failures, while rejection sensitivity captures negative emotionality in the face of social rejection, we hypothesized that individuals higher on imposterism would be more sensitive to hypothetical achievement failures, while individuals higher on rejection sensitivity would be sensitive to social rejection failures.

Participants from the University of Pennsylvania (n = 295) completed vignettes describing either social failures or achievement failures. Participants with higher impostorism scores responded more negatively to all the rejection vignettes (b=0.98, p< .01). Similarly, participants higher in rejection sensitivity responded more negatively to all the rejection vignettes (b=0.22, p< .01). There was no significant interaction between rejection type and impostorism or rejection type and social anxiety. In other words, participants with higher impostorism scores were not particularly sensitive to one type of vignette over the other, and the same was true for students with high social anxiety scores. Imposterism was also found to significantly correlate with rejection sensitvity (r = 0.44, p < .01), depression (r = 0.49, p < .01), social anxiety (r = 0.58, p < .01), and perfectionism (r = 0.42, p < .01). These results were contrary to our hypothesis that those with high levels of impostor syndrome will respond more negatively to the achievement failure vignettes than the social rejection vignettes, and that those with high levels of rejection sensitivity will respond more negatively to the social rejection vignettes than the achievement failure vignettes. Instead, it appears that both imposterism and rejection sensitivity may both stem from a common factor of negative emotionality and heightened sensitivity to failures or rejections regardless of whether achievement or social.