ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the evolutionary role of attachment strategies and their pivotal role in rejection sensitivity. The chapter also notes how sensitivity to rejection can affect people’s concerns about social rank and their tendency to engage in submissive and subordinate behaviours when socially threatened. After describing how rejection sensitivity can be understood in terms of the close relationship between attachment theory and social rank theory, I will explore how an evolutionary model of rejection sensitivity can be used to integrate other explanations based on psychodynamics, family interactions, neurotransmitter changes and genetic factors. Clinical examples demonstrating the central importance of rejection sensitivity to emotional disorders are given and discussed within an evolutionary framework.
