Social anxiety disorder (SAD) can be a crippling disorder characterized by strong avoidance of social situations and encounters due to fear of judgment from others, leading to various social and...Show moreSocial anxiety disorder (SAD) can be a crippling disorder characterized by strong avoidance of social situations and encounters due to fear of judgment from others, leading to various social and interpersonal problems. Socially anxious individuals (SAI) often have cognitive biases that influence how they perceive social feedback from others and can perpetuate the disorder. How SAI learn from social feedback is important, as this can determine their self-view. The goal of this study is to investigate the influence of a specific cognitive bias in attention in socially anxious individuals (SAI) on social feedback learning. This study was conducted using a modified social judgment paradigm, designed to expose participants to positive and negative social feedback from 4 fictitious peers, who vary in their percentage of positive feedback. Participants will learn which peer gives the most and least feedback throughout the task. This will be conducted and measured using Electroencephalography (EEG). The results showed that SAI tend to orient their attention towards unexpected social feedback, regardless of valence. As well as this, SAIs tend to learn less from unexpected negative social feedback compared to lower SAI. Even though SAI payed more attention to unexpected social feedback, we propose that there might be an avoidance coping mechanism which influences the SAI to learn less from the unexpected negative social feedback.Show less
