Rohner: We’ve worked with several hundred thousand people over the past 60-some-odd years on every continent except Antarctica, and while doing that, we’ve learned many lessons about what we’re like and not like as human beings. The beauty of the work we do is that we can now empirically document three things, among others. First, humans everywhere – in any place in the world that we’ve found so far – understand themselves to be cared about or not cared about in the same four ways. So far, no exceptions. Second, if you feel the person or people who are most important to you – these are usually parents when we’re kids and intimate partners when we’re adults, but there could be others like teachers or coaches – if you feel that person doesn’t really want you, appreciate you, care about you, love you, if you feel rejected by that person, most people will respond in exactly the same way. A cluster of 10 things start to happen. We get anxious, insecure. We have anger problems. Our self-esteem is impaired. Children can have issues of cognitive distortions, in which they start to think about themselves in distorted ways. The third important lesson comes from Sumbleen’s work.
Ali: I came to UConn as a psychology student and enjoyed working with Ron so much that I decided to pursue a graduate degree in human development and family sciences. In conversations about IPARTheory, we developed an argument that parental acceptance and rejection might be rooted in our shared biocultural evolution, and I wanted to investigate how that shows up in the brain. This became the focus of my dissertation – the first in affective neuroscience at UConn – under the guidance of my Ph.D. advisors, Preston Britner and Ron Rohner. The research examined how early parental experiences shape emotional regulation. We scanned the brains of students who reported either parental acceptance or rejection while they played a simulated ball-tossing game designed to mimic social exclusion. Those with rejection histories showed more activity in areas linked to emotion and memory, suggesting they were re-experiencing past rejection. Participants who felt loved showed more activation in regions tied to rational thinking, possibly reframing the experience. Now, we’re analyzing resting-state brain data to see whether differences in brain connectivity appear even without an external task.