Research master thesis | Psychology (research) (MSc)
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Depression and social anxiety are among the most prevalent and co-occurring mental-health problems related to difficulties in social decision-making and aberrant responses to social reward and...Show moreDepression and social anxiety are among the most prevalent and co-occurring mental-health problems related to difficulties in social decision-making and aberrant responses to social reward and punishment. Processing social feedback and integrating information from negative and positive outcomes are important for adapting behaviors and cognitions accordingly. Thus, in order to better understand the mechanisms underlying affective problems such as depression and social anxiety, it is crucial to investigate how they relate to differences in social feedback processing and learning through social evaluative feedback. This study aimed to investigate whether depressive and social anxiety symptoms in healthy young adults were differentially associated with how individuals learned through positive and negative peer feedback and electrocortical responses to social feedback which would help elucidate the underlying mechanisms of the aforementioned affective problems. Nineteen participants (18-25 years old) took part in a novel social probabilistic learning task while concurrent EEG was being recorded. In this task, participants believed that they received acceptance and rejection feedback from actual peers. In reality, each of the four peers provided computerized feedback with assigned probabilities of 85%, 70%, 30%, and 15% acceptance. The participants showed positive expectancy and positive memory biases. Social anxiety symptoms predicted a lower positive memory bias. The participants learned the probabilities in the expected direction for each peer through trial-and-error over the course of the task. No differences in learning were observed in relation to depression and social anxiety. As expected, the time-frequency theta (4- 7 Hz) power was larger following unexpected rejection, particularly, in comparison to expected acceptance. However, delta power (1-4 Hz) was largest for both expected acceptance and unexpected rejection. There were no interactions between time-frequency responses and individual differences in depression and social anxiety. Our findings demonstrate that healthy young adults show positive expectancy and memory biases for social evaluative situations with peers which can be reduced by the level of social anxiety one experiences. These could be informative for professionals practicing in mental health such that they can target the way socially anxious individuals recall events in treatment. This study also shows that individuals use positive and negative social evaluative feedback to adapt their feedback expectations from others.Show less
