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.
Highlights
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by fear of negative evaluation from others in social contexts according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (American Psychiatric Association, 2000)
The two sample t-test showed that the SAD participants (M = 58.5%, SD = 13.96) showed significantly lower peer-acceptance expectancy in real life than did the healthy controls (HCs) (M = 78.95%, SD = 15.09; t38 = 4.614, p < 0.001)
SAD participants (M = 43.5%, SD = 13.89) had significantly more negative-acceptance expectancy in the experiment than did HC participants (M = 58.62%, SD = 11.13; t38 = 3.847, p < 0.001)
Summary
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by fear of negative evaluation from others in social contexts according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Such intense fear of social evaluation is associated with a negative cognitive bias (i.e., negative-expectancy bias), which in turn impairs social ability in daily life. Socially anxious participants rated interviewers as having more negative opinions about them (Pozo et al, 1991) The existence of such a negative-expectancy bias was confirmed in a recent study, which indicated that highly socially anxious individuals showed lower expectancy of positive social feedback in a two-visit task (Caouette et al, 2015). In a word, converging evidences have suggested that socially anxious individuals and patients with SAD demonstrate a negative bias in their expectancy for, and interpretation of, social evaluation (Amin et al, 1998; Messenger et al, 2004; Franklin et al, 2005; Creswell et al, 2014)
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