Social anxiety is characterized by biased learning about performance and the self

Abstract

People learn about their self from social information, and recent work suggests that healthy adults show a positive bias for learning self-related information. In contrast, social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by a negative view of the self, yet what causes and maintains this negative self-view is not well understood. Here the authors use a novel experimental paradigm and computational model to test the hypothesis that biased social learning regarding self-evaluation and self-feelings represents a core feature that distinguishes adults with SAD from healthy controls. Twenty-one adults with SAD and 35 healthy controls (HCs) performed a speech in front of 3 judges. They subsequently evaluated themselves and received performance feedback from the judges and then rated how they felt about themselves and the judges. Affective updating (i.e., change in feelings about the self over time, in response to feedback from the judges) was modeled using an adapted Rescorla-Wagner learning model. HCs demonstrated a positivity bias in affective updating, which was absent in SAD. Further, self-performance ratings revealed group differences in learning from positive feedback-a difference that endured at an average of 1 year follow up. These findings demonstrate the presence and long-term endurance of positively biased social learning about the self among healthy adults, a bias that is absent or reversed among socially anxious adults. (PsycINFO Database Record

Figure 1. Hypotheses and experimental design

A) Competing hypotheses regarding the maintenance of negative self-perception and negative self-evaluation in social anxiety disorder (SAD) compared to healthy controls (HC). SAD might be characterized by reduced attention to social information and impaired learning from social feedback. Alternatively, SAD might be characterized by negatively biased learning from social feedback, relative to HCs. B) Participants were asked to deliver a speech about their ideal job in front of three live judges, who evaluated their performance on 58 different dimensions relevant to social anxiety (sketch by John Coetzee, retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trier_social_stress_test#/media/File:Trier_01.jpg, licensed under a creative commons attribution, CC BY-SA 3.0). C) After the speech, participants performed a self-evaluation and social feedback task. Participants were presented with a rating dimension and asked to evaluate themselves, before viewing the judges’ feedback (rating) on this dimension. Participants then rated how they felt about themselves and how they felt about the judges using a VAS with anchors from “very bad” to “very good”.

Figure 2. Group differences in affective updating and changes in self-evaluation

A) Learning rates for updating feeling about the self and feeling about the judges, separately modeled for negative and positive affective updating. SAD participants (solid red) updated their feeling about the self more based on negative information than HC, who showed a significant positivity bias (dashed blue line). No group differences were observed for updating feeling about the judges, where both HC and SAD showed stronger positive than negative updating. B) Judges’ feedback also differentially impacted self-rated performance on the speech task. The results showed a significant influence of feedback on self-evaluative performance ratings, and a significant valence*group interaction over time: HCs adjusted more towards positive feedback, whereas SAD participants adjusted more towards negative social feedback. Asterisks denote significant group differences; t denotes a statistical trend (p = 0.07); vertical bars denote standard errors (SEM).