Social performance feedback received from others influences self-feelings and self-evaluations. Recent work provides initial evidence that socially anxious individuals, characterized by a...Show moreSocial performance feedback received from others influences self-feelings and self-evaluations. Recent work provides initial evidence that socially anxious individuals, characterized by a consistent negative self-view, show a negative bias for learning selfrelated information. A social speech task paradigm and a computational model were used to assess the hypothesis of whether a negative social learning bias regarding self-evaluation and self-feelings is present in subclinical socially anxious people. 106 young adults gave a speech in front of 3 judges from whom they received either positive or negative performance feedback. The feedback from the judges was simultaneously presented with the participants' own self-rating on their performance. Immediately after viewing both feedbacks, participants rated how they felt about themselves on a VAS scale. Affective Updating and an adapted Rescorla-Wagner learning model were used to assess how people changed their self-feelings over time in response to received feedback valence. Additionally, the study investigated the association between perfectionism, social anxiety and negative social feedback. Given that perfectionism is strongly related to both social anxiety and social rejection, we tested whether individuals with elevated levels of social anxiety and perfectionism would adjust their selffeelings stronger towards negative social feedback. Results did not indicate a negative social learning bias on self-feelings after receiving negative social feedback in socially anxious individuals. Also, perfectionism was not found to be a moderator between social anxiety and negative social feedback. Overall, results were non-significant, however, our study lies the groundwork and highlights the importance of further studies in this field.Show less
Fluctuations in self-esteem help us monitor social acceptance and potential social threats, such as rejection. However, how people interpret and react to social acceptance and rejection depends on...Show moreFluctuations in self-esteem help us monitor social acceptance and potential social threats, such as rejection. However, how people interpret and react to social acceptance and rejection depends on individual differences in how sensitive people are to rejection. Highly rejectionsensitive individuals anxiously expect, readily perceive and overreact to rejection. This study examined how individual differences in rejection sensitivity modulate self-esteem fluctuations in response to social feedback. Participants (n = 190; age - range = 17 - 38) performed a task that entailed receiving acceptance and rejection feedback from raters who differed in their propensity to provide acceptance feedback. Participants were asked to indicate whether they expected the raters to like them and repeatedly reported on their momentary self-esteem after receiving feedback. The findings indicate that self-esteem increased in response to acceptance feedback and decreased in response to rejection feedback, and these effects were exacerbated when rejection was unexpected. Further analyses with a subset of participants (n = 165; age - range = 17 - 31) who completed a rejection sensitivity questionnaire revealed a potential mechanism through which rejection sensitivity may give rise to psychopathology. In addition to expecting rejection more often than participants with low rejection sensitivity levels, highly rejection-sensitive participants showed larger decreases in self-esteem in response to rejection and larger increases in self-esteem in response to acceptance feedback. This sensitivity may exacerbate declines in self-esteem in response to rejection instances in their day-to-day interactions, making them more vulnerable to developing persistent low self-esteem and, ultimately, mental health issues.Show less
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
ow self-esteem lies at the core of various psychiatric disorders. Emotional maltreatment during childhood is associated with low self-esteem and elevated sensitivity to social rejection later in...Show moreow self-esteem lies at the core of various psychiatric disorders. Emotional maltreatment during childhood is associated with low self-esteem and elevated sensitivity to social rejection later in life. However, it is unclear how childhood emotional maltreatment impacts on the extent to which moment-to-moment self-esteem is shaped by social evaluation. This study examined associations between retrospectively reported emotional maltreatment and self-esteem reactivity in response to social evaluation. Young adult participants (n = 78; 55 female) reported on childhood emotional abuse and neglect and current trait self-esteem. Since behavioural data collection was not possible due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I created a simulated dataset by matching participants’ self-report data to self-esteem responsivity data from other participants with identical trait self-esteem scores who performed a social evaluation task. Results showed that childhood abuse and neglect were negatively related to trait self-esteem. Task data revealed that approval increased self-esteem and disapproval decreased it. Simulated data showed no evidence of emotional abuse and neglect moderating self-esteem responsivity to social evaluation. These findings suggest that, while childhood maltreatment is linked to low trait self-esteem later in life, lower self-esteem is likely not caused by greater self-esteem reactivity to social evaluation. These findings highlight the need to research alternative pathways by which a history of emotional maltreatment may contribute to the maintenance of low self-esteem.Show less
How people generally evaluate their self-worth (i.e., their trait self-esteem) determines the extent to which they use social feedback to update their momentary self-esteem. However, it remains...Show moreHow people generally evaluate their self-worth (i.e., their trait self-esteem) determines the extent to which they use social feedback to update their momentary self-esteem. However, it remains unclear if the lack of positive expectations, typical of those with low trait self-esteem, renders them more prone to momentary changes of self-esteem. This study investigated how inter-individual differences in trait self-esteem and expectedness of social feedback moderated the impact of social approval and disapproval (i.e., valence of feedback) on self-esteem updates. Participants (N = 78) performed a social evaluation task, where they repeatedly predicted whether they expected to be approved of or not, and subsequently reported on their level of selfesteem after receiving the social feedback. Results showed that self-esteem updated depending on the valence of feedback, but expectations were only relevant if the person was exposed to social disapproval. To be precise, in both high and low trait self-esteem participants, self-esteem decreased the most when they expected to receive approval but were given disapproval instead. Low trait self-esteem was associated with lower state self-esteem throughout the task, and compared to high, low self-esteem participants had a more unstable self-esteem when faced with repeated social evaluations. However, the extent to which state self-esteem increased following approval and decreased with disapproval was no different from people with high trait selfesteem. These findings suggest that despite their vulnerabilities to social feedback, low selfesteem individuals benefit from social approval and realistic expectations as much as people with higher trait self-esteem. Knowledge of these effects can aid in the creation of interventions to promote a healthy development of self-esteem.Show less
