Subjective pain and reward in a social judgment paradigm

Affective problems such as social anxiety and depression theoretically involve negative cognitive biases that trigger and maintain symptoms during everyday experiences. This study employed a social judgment paradigm to investigate possible biases in expectation of social acceptance, and subjective feelings of pain and reward. Healthy adult participants (N = 120) were told their image had been judged by others. In 120 trials, they were shown photos of the judges and asked to anticipate whether they were liked by them or not, before being shown the judgment. Participants rated their level of pain and reward in each trial. Results indicated that social acceptance was expected less often by participants with higher levels of social anxiety. Self-reported pain was greatest after unexpected rejection. A greater likelihood of the presence of pain and higher self-reported pain were associated with higher levels of social anxiety and depression respectively. Self-reported reward was greatest after expected acceptance, and was not associated with social anxiety or depression. This study provides subjective experience information that has been missing from existing social judgment research. Moreover, these findings suggest that in social situations, those with social anxiety and depression more often expect rejection and experience rejection as more painful, respectively. These biases are potential maintaining factors and may be targets for further research and future intervention development.</p

Learning from social performance feedback: an electrophysiological examination

Healthy individuals tend to show a positive expectancy bias in social-evaluative settings and tend to update their self-views more based on positive than negative information (i.e., showing a positivity bias for learning self-related information; Somerville et al., 2010; Kern et al., 2012; Sharot et al., 2016; Koban et al., 2017). Koban and colleagues (2017) successfully used a novel performance feedback paradigm to test the hypothesis that biased social learning regarding self-evaluation and self-feelings represents a core feature that distinguishes adults with social anxiety disorder (SAD) from healthy controls. In this paradigm, participants performed a speech in front of three judges, after which they evaluated themselves, received performance feedback from the three judges and indicated how they felt about themselves. Affective updating was examined as changes in self-feelings over time, in response to the judges’ performance feedback. Koban and colleagues (2017) showed that adults with SAD updated their self-directed feelings and self-perception to a greater extent in response to negative than positive performance feedback. The opposite (i.e., positive) updating bias was found in healthy adults. Here we use the same performance task to examine the neurophysiological signatures of this affective updating bias in healthy young adult participants (aged 18-to-25 years). To this end, we will examine EEG frontal-midline (FM) theta responses to judges' feedback about participants' speech performance. FM-theta has been coined as a generic mechanism for implementing adaptive control of behavior in volatile and uncertain situations. And FM-theta responses during such contexts have been found to be dependent on participants' anxiety levels. As such, we argue that FM-theta will relate to the affective prediction errors (i.e., the mismatch between participants' self-evaluations and the feedback from the judges) during this speech paradigm. Specifically, we will examine whether FM-theta reactivity relates to the biased social learning about performance feedback in anxious individuals (e.g., social anxiety)

Revisiting the electrophysiological correlates of valence and expectancy in reward processing – A Multi-lab replication

Two event-related brain potential (ERP) components elicited during feedback processing are the frontocentral feedback-related negativity (FRN), followed by the posterior P300. According to the Error-Related Reinforcement Learning Theory (Holroyd &amp; Coles, 2002), the FRN amplitude is largest when the outcome is negative and unexpected. Complementing this, studies on the subsequent P300 have often reported larger amplitudes for positive than negative outcomes. In an influential ERP study, Hajcak et al., (2005) manipulated outcome valence and expectancy in a guessing task. However, they found that the FRN component was larger for negative (no-reward) than positive (reward) outcomes, irrespective of expectancy. Conversely, the P300 component was larger for unexpected than expected outcomes, irrespective of valence. These results were at odds with prominent theories and extant literature. Here, we aim to replicate these results within the #EEGManyLabs project (Pavlov et al., 2021). Across thirteen labs we will not only undertake a close replication, but test the robustness of these effects to analytical choices (e.g. quantification of ERPs) and supplement the findings with Bayesian multilevel linear models to test for the reported absence of the effects