Social interactions are an integral part of the human experience, with social feedback being a prominent aspect of daily interaction However, for individuals diagnosed with SAD social feedback is...Show moreSocial interactions are an integral part of the human experience, with social feedback being a prominent aspect of daily interaction However, for individuals diagnosed with SAD social feedback is an anxiety-inducing scenario. Previous research aimed to investigate the effect of social feedback on individuals' views of themselves, thus comparing differences between healthy controls and individuals with SAD. The results of this experiment indicated a negativity bias towards social feedback compared to a positivity bias in healthy controls. The current study, the Changing Minds Study, was closely based on the aforementioned study and aimed to examine the relationship between self-concept and social feedback learning rates in adolescents. Similar to the prior mentioned study, participants (N=80) of the Changing Minds Study were asked to perform a speech with the premise of being socially evaluated by judges in another room. However, this was a deceptive measure. The results of the study were partly congruent with previous studies, finding a positivity bias toward social feedback in healthy individuals. This means that they update their self-concept more when receiving positive feedback, than when receiving negative feedback. In conclusion, Self-Concept and Positive Social Feedback Learning were significantly positively correlated, showing that Self-Concept is closely linked to the updating of one’s views of the self when receiving positive feedback. However, none of the other correlations showed to be significant. Nevertheless, trends supporting the claim that individuals with SAD have a negativity bias toward social feedback were shown.Show less
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
