Social inference and social anxiety: Evidence of a fear-congruent self-referential learning bias

Reduced positive evidence within activated self-schema may underpin increased sensitivity to negative evaluation in socially anxious individuals

“…We replicated, and also refined, influential findings on associative learning in social anxiety (Koban et al, 2017). Using a highly reproducible task Button et al (2012Button et al ( , 2015, we confirmed that socially anxious (high-FNE) individuals showed higher learning rates governing the impact of negative information on predictions about the self. Overall, learning was faster for positive feedback, yet this did not fully account for participants' optimistic predictions about the self.…”

“…temperamental preparedness and operant learning routes to anxiety, such as behavioural inhibition and reinforcement via safety-behaviours, are also postulated to be important (Spence & Rapee, 2016).f Individuals who show high fear of negative evaluation (FNE) display negatively biased processing of social-evaluative information (Winton, Clark, & Edelmann, 1995) and are prone to social anxiety (Stopa & Clark, 2001). Button and colleagues (Button et al, 2012(Button et al, , 2015 demonstrated negative bias about the self in a Social Evaluation Learning Task, wherein a computer persona described either themselves or an unknown other. Those more fearful of negative evaluation selected significantly fewer positive attributes when asked to predict how the computer persona would describe them, but displayed no bias when making predictions about unknown others.…”

Episodic foresight and anxiety: Proximate and ultimate perspectives

“…Socially anxious individuals remember social events with a higher degree of self‐referential detail, and tend to remember these events more from an observer's point of view (rather than a personal one), relative to asymptomatic controls (D'Argembeau et al ., ). Higher degrees of social anxiety are associated with a self‐referential learning bias for negative versus positive information, and SAD is associated with increased vmPFC activation in response to second relative to first person perspectives on social situations (Blair et al ., ; Button, Browning, Munafò, & Lewis, ).…”

The Impact of Social Anxiety on Occupational Participation in College Life

“…Environments were evaluated by participants as to their potential to cause an increase in anxiety. This thinking bias is the process by which socially anxious people base their judgement about a situation on self-observation of physical anxiety cues, and how they process their fears and the information available (Button, Browning, Munafò, & Lewis, 2012;Eysenck, 2000). A person may therefore find the library environment pleasant until they misinterpret a social cue from another student, at which point they may experience a high degree of anxiety.…”