Emily, a high-achieving student, has a huge crush on Jaxon,, a boy in her class who has a reputation for being a 'bad influence' and doing drugs. Rather than acknowledge her feelings, she begins acting rude toward him. What type of defense mechanism is this an example of?

Alright. So in this one, Emily, a high achieving student, has a huge crush on Jackson, a boy in her class who has a reputation for being a bad influence and doing drugs. Rather than acknowledge these feelings, she begins acting very rude toward him. What type of defense mechanism is this an example of? So what's happening here is that she feels attraction to this person. Right? She likes them, but she's acting in the opposite way. She's acting rude and unkind. So when we have that kind of threatening inner feeling that causes us to begin reacting with the opposite behavior, that would be an example of reaction formation. Right? So looking quickly at our other answer choices to see why they are incorrect. So denial, if this was a case of denial, Emily would be attracted to him but she would just basically be unable to accept that. It would kind of be cut off at the unconscious level. She wouldn't even be able to consciously attain that thought. So that would be what denial would be doing here. Projection would be like if she, you know, she's attracted to Jackson and so she looks at Jackson and says, oh, he's attracted to me. She's project she would she would be projecting that thought onto him. So that would be what projection would be doing, which is not what's happening here. And then, finally, regression would probably not take place here. Regression is reverting back to a previous stage of development, which based on this scenario we have no evidence that Emily is doing. So our answer here is that she is doing some classic reaction formation. And there you go.