During everyday interactions people constantly receive feedback on their behavior, which shapes their beliefs about themselves. While classic studies in the field of social learning suggest that people have a tendency to learn better from good news (positivity bias) when they perceive little opportunities to immediately improve their own performance, we show updating is biased towards negative information when participants perceive the opportunity to adapt their performance during learning. In three consecutive experiments we applied a computational modeling approach on the subjects’ learning behavior and reveal the negativity bias was specific for learning about own compared to others’ performances and was modulated by prior beliefs about the self, i.e. stronger negativity bias in individuals lower in self-esteem. Social anxiety affected self-related negativity biases only when individuals were exposed to a judging audience thereby potentially explaining the persistence of negative self-images in socially anxious individuals which commonly surfaces in social settings. Self-related belief formation is therefore surprisingly negatively biased in situations suggesting opportunities to improve and this bias is shaped by trait differences in self-esteem and social anxiety.

The feedback people receive on their behavior shapes the process of belief formation and self-efficacy in mastering a particular task. However, the neural and computational mechanisms of how the subjective value of self-efficacy beliefs, and the corresponding affect, influence the learning process remain unclear. We investigated these mechanisms during self-efficacy belief formation using fMRI, pupillometry, and computational modeling, and by analyzing individual differences in affective experience. Biases in the formation of self-efficacy beliefs were associated with affect, pupil dilation, and neural activity within the anterior insula, amygdala, ventral tegmental area/ substantia nigra, and mPFC. Specifically, neural and pupil responses mapped the valence of the prediction errors in correspondence with individuals’ experienced affective states and learning biases during self-efficacy belief formation. Together with the functional connectivity dynamics of the anterior insula within this network, our results provide evidence for neural and computational mechanisms of how we arrive at affected beliefs.

Being confronted with social-evaluative stress elicits a physiological and a psychological stress response. This calls for regulatory processes to manage negative affect and maintain self-related optimistic beliefs. The aim of the current study was to investigate the affect-regulating potential of self-related belief updating after exposure to social-evaluative stress, in comparison to non-social physical stress or no stress. We assessed self-related belief updating using trial-by-trial performance feedback and described the updating behavior in a mechanistic way using computational modeling. We found that social-evaluative stress was accompanied by an increase in cortisol and negative affect which was related to a shift in self-related belief updating towards the positive direction. This self-beneficial belief updating, which was absent after physical stress or control, was associated with a better recovery from stress-induced negative affect. This indicates that enhanced integration of positive self-related feedback can act as a coping strategy to deal with social-evaluative stress.