Social anxiety and depression appear to change the way we process feedback

People with social anxiety and depression process feedback about their personalities in distinct ways. While social anxiety is linked to an increased tendency to internalize negative feedback about competence, depression is associated with a reduced ability to accept positive feedback about any aspect of personality. These findings were recently published in the journal *Behaviour Research and Therapy*.

The way individuals view themselves is not completely fixed. People constantly gather social feedback and use it to adjust their self-image, a process psychologists call belief updating. The extent to which a person revises their self-image depends on their initial beliefs and the nature of the feedback they receive.

According to a concept known as self-verification theory, people are generally motivated to maintain a consistent self-image. They often accept feedback that aligns with what they already believe and reject information that contradicts it. The researchers view this process through a statistical framework known as Bayesian updating.

When a prior belief is held with high confidence, new evidence is less likely to alter it. Conversely, feedback that confirms an existing expectation is easily assimilated into a person’s worldview. Psychological conditions like social anxiety and depression are characterized by persistent negative views of the self.

Researchers have theorized that biased belief updating might help maintain these negative views. An individual might ignore compliments but fixate on a minor criticism. Personality traits generally fall into two broad categories that might influence this process.

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The first category is agency, which involves characteristics like competence, assertiveness, and status. The second category is communion, which involves traits related to warmth, empathy, and social connection. Past research on belief updating has mostly ignored this distinction between agency and communion.

Researchers Zohar Klein and Reut Zabag from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, along with their colleagues, wanted to test how social anxiety and depression influence the way people update these specific types of self-beliefs. They suspected that the type of trait being evaluated would alter how people processed the feedback.

To test these ideas, the research team recruited 560 adults residing in the United States. Participants completed questionnaires to measure the severity of their social anxiety and depression symptoms. The researchers then had the participants complete an assessment called the SocialMirror task.

Participants provided a brief written introduction of themselves. The researchers told the participants that a machine learning tool would analyze their descriptions and evaluate how other people perceived them. In reality, the feedback was pre-programmed by the research team.

During the task, participants saw various personality traits on a screen. Half of the traits were related to agency, such as being strong or assertive. The other half were related to communion, such as being pleasant or caring.

For each trait, participants guessed whether the software considered the word characteristic of them. After guessing, the screen displayed immediate feedback indicating whether the participant was correct or incorrect. The experiment involved two distinct phases.

In the first phase, the software provided negative feedback on 80 percent of the trials. If a participant guessed a positive trait applied to them, the software told them they were wrong. Participants who started with a highly negative self-image updated their beliefs even further in the negative direction, absorbing information that confirmed their existing biases.

In the second phase, the rules reversed without warning. The software suddenly provided positive feedback on 80 percent of the trials. By tracking how participants changed their guesses after receiving feedback, the researchers could measure how much they updated their self-beliefs.

Before factoring in mental health symptoms, the researchers noticed a general trend in how people updated their beliefs. Participants updated communal traits much more readily than agentic traits.

Because agentic traits like competence are central to a person’s core identity, people might hold onto those beliefs with greater rigidity. Communal traits, which are focused on relating to others, appear to be more flexible. When the researchers looked at social anxiety, they noticed a specific pattern during the negative feedback phase.

Participants with higher levels of social anxiety updated their beliefs much more when receiving negative feedback about their agency. They were highly sensitive to information suggesting they lacked competence or status. This increased sensitivity did not extend to communal traits.

Socially anxious participants did not update their beliefs any differently than others when told they lacked warmth. Depression showed a completely different pattern. During the positive feedback phase, participants with higher depression scores updated their beliefs less than other participants.

This effect happened across both agentic and communal traits. Even when individuals with depression were repeatedly told they possessed positive characteristics, they struggled to incorporate that information into their self-image. They effectively blocked out the positive feedback regardless of whether it pertained to their competence or their kindness.

The research team noted that these distinct patterns could help therapists tailor treatments. For individuals with social anxiety, therapy might focus on challenging the importance placed on status and competence. By learning to critically evaluate negative feedback, they might protect their self-esteem from unwarranted drops.

For individuals with depression, therapy might involve methods to increase openness to positive information. Introducing mildly positive feedback, rather than overwhelming praise that contradicts their negative worldview entirely, might help these individuals slowly rebuild a positive self-image. This gradual approach could prevent them from instantly dismissing compliments.

The study relied on an online sample of adults who self-reported their psychiatric symptoms. Because social anxiety and depression frequently occur together, it can be difficult to isolate the exact effects of each condition. The experiment also relied on an abrupt shift from mostly negative to mostly positive feedback.

In everyday life, social feedback usually changes much more gradually. Future experiments might use slower transitions to better mimic natural social environments. Additionally, the researchers measured initial self-beliefs during the early trials of the task rather than independently before the experiment began.

This methodological choice makes it slightly harder to separate a person’s baseline self-image from their immediate reaction to the first few pieces of feedback. Independent assessments of prior beliefs could help clarify these dynamics in future research.

The study, “On Bias and Balance: Updating Agentic and Communal Self-Beliefs in Social Anxiety and Depression,” was authored by Zohar Klein, Reut Zabag, Dan Hay, Einat Levy-Gigi, and Eva Gilboa-Schechtman.