Self-beneficial belief updating as a coping mechanism for stress-induced negative affect

Abstract

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.

Neurocomputational mechanisms of affected beliefs

“…Studies do not only suggest that biases in belief formation differ between tasks (Ertac, 2011;Müller-Pinzler et al, 2019;Sharot and Garrett, 2016) but also depend on situational factors like stress (Czekalla et al, 2021;Garrett et al, 2018). The individual's ability to adjust the current information processing strategy to the context might be adaptive (Bromberg-Martin and Sharot, 2020): for example, adaptation to an increased relevance of negative or threat-related information during stress (Garrett et al, 2018) or coping with a negative self-concept following social stress by means of more self-beneficial belief updating (Czekalla et al, 2021). It might also be adaptive for people who fear negative feedback to pay more attention to failure-related information in order to learn and circumvent potential future failures (Sedikides and Hepper, 2009).…”

“…While on average we find a negativity bias during self-related belief formation, a little less than one third of the participants still shows a positive learning bias, pointing out the importance of individual factors and meaningfulness of variability. Studies do not only suggest that biases in belief formation differ between tasks (Ertac, 2011;Müller-Pinzler et al, 2019;Sharot and Garrett, 2016) but also depend on situational factors like stress (Czekalla et al, 2021;Garrett et al, 2018). The individual's ability to adjust the current information processing strategy to the context might be adaptive (Bromberg-Martin and Sharot, 2020): for example, adaptation to an increased relevance of negative or threat-related information during stress (Garrett et al, 2018) or coping with a negative self-concept following social stress by means of more self-beneficial belief updating (Czekalla et al, 2021).…”

“…The design of the LOOP task provided a High Ability and a Low Ability condition which resulted in overall four feedback conditions: Agent condition (Self vs Other) x Ability condition (High Ability vs Low Ability; see Figure 1b and methods for a detailed description of the task). In previous studies we showed that over time participants adapted their expected performance 9 ratings according to the feedback allowing for an assessment of valence specific self-and other-related learning processes (Czekalla et al, 2021;Müller-Pinzler et al, 2019).…”

“…In previous studies, we showed that over time, participants adapted their expected performance ratings according to the feedback, allowing for an assessment of valence-specific self-and other-related learning processes 5,6 .…”

“…happiness about one's own good health prognosis, represent intrinsic values that individuals are inclined to optimize during belief formation (Bromberg-Martin and Sharot, 2020;Hughes and Zaki, 2015). To prove this entanglement of affect and belief formation, we applied a learning task that induces affective reactions during the process of forming conceptually novel beliefs about own abilities in mastering a task (Czekalla et al, 2021;Müller-Pinzler et al, 2019). We focused on the primary affective states elicited by self-related beliefsthe selfconscious emotions of embarrassment and prideand their impact on the belief.…”