Unexpected Acceptance? Patients with Social Anxiety Disorder Manifest their Social Expectancy in ERPs During Social Feedback Processing

Abstract

Previous studies on social anxiety have demonstrated negative-expectancy bias in social contexts. In this study, we used a paradigm that employed self-relevant positive or negative social feedback, in order to test whether this negative expectancy manifests in event-related potentials (ERPs) during social evaluation among socially anxious individuals. Behavioral data revealed that individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) showed more negative expectancy of peer acceptance both in the experiment and in daily life than did the healthy control participants. Regarding ERP results, we found a overally larger P2 for positive social feedback and also a group main effect, such that the P2 was smaller in SAD group. SAD participants demonstrated a larger feedback-related negativity (FRN) to positive feedback than to negative feedback. In addition, SAD participants showed a more positive ΔFRN (ΔFRN = negative – positive). Furthermore, acceptance expectancy in daily life correlated negatively with ΔFRN amplitude, while the Interaction Anxiousness Scale (IAS) score correlated positively with the ΔFRN amplitude. Finally, the acceptance expectancy in daily life fully mediated the relationship between the IAS and ΔFRN. These results indicated that both groups could differentiate between positive and negative social feedback in the early stage of social feedback processing (reflected on the P2). However, the SAD group exhibited a larger FRN to positive social feedback than to negative social feedback, demonstrating their dysfunction in the late stage of social feedback processing. In our opinion, such dysfunction is due to their greater negative social feedback expectancy.

Impulsive personality dimensions are associated with altered behavioral performance and neural responses in the monetary incentive delay task

“…In contrast, the FRN pattern among low disinhibition participants did not vary as a function of incentive conditions. To our knowledge, this study is among the first ones to report that correct feedback elicits a larger FRN than incorrect feedback in certain groups of people (see also Cao, Gu, Bi, Zhu, & Wu, 2015), although it has long been acknowledged that the FRN amplitude is sensitive to individual difference in personality constructs (Proudfit, 2015; San Martín, 2012). According to the PRO model, this surprising finding indicates that in the neutral incentive condition, correct outcomes were more unexpected than incorrect ones for high disinhibition participants.…”

Social dimension and complexity differentially influence brain responses during feedback processing

“…Larger P300 amplitudes were expected after positive compared to negative, and after social compared to non-social feedback. For P2 amplitudes, we hypothesized sensitivity to feedback valence and social dimension (Cao, Gu, Bi, Zhu, & Wu, 2015;Cuthbert et al, 2000;Rigoni, Polezzi, Rumiati, Guarino, & Sartori, 2010). We expected larger amplitudes for social than non-social stimuli; we were not able to state a directional hypothesis for valence effects due to inconsistent previous results.…”

Electrocortical measures of information processing biases in social anxiety disorder: A review

“…Cao, Gu, Bi, Zhu, and Wu (2015) found that patients with SAD displayed an increased FRN in response to acceptance feedback from peers. This was interpreted to reflect a violation of negative feedback expectancies, since socially anxious participants anticipated a larger proportion of negative peer feedback in this study (Cao et al, 2015). A difficulty with this interpretation is that expectancies were not recorded during the EEG experiment (on a trial-to-trial basis), but as an overall Likert-scale measure prior to the task to index general expectancies about the social evaluative outcome.…”

“…However, recent studies showed that depending on the likelihood of an outcome, the FRN component might be sensitive to both negative and positive information (Ferdinand, Mecklinger, Kray, & Gehring, 2012;Oliveira, McDonald, & Goodman, 2007). Cao, Gu, Bi, Zhu, and Wu (2015) found that patients with SAD displayed an increased FRN in response to acceptance feedback from peers. This was interpreted to reflect a violation of negative feedback expectancies, since socially anxious participants anticipated a larger proportion of negative peer feedback in this study (Cao et al, 2015).…”

“…Taken together, studies have found mixed findings on the influence of social anxiety on the FRN component. A possible FRN effect might be related to the severity of symptoms, since the effect is significant in patients with SAD (Cao et al, 2015), marginally significant in high socially anxious individuals (Judah, Grant, Frosio, et al, 2016), and not significant in healthy participants (Van der Molen et al, 2014).…”