The self through the social mirror: Negative updating of self beliefs in social anxiety disorder

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a highly prevalent and impairing condition characterized by negative self-beliefs and interpersonal difficulties. Enhanced updating of self-beliefs in response to negative social feedback is theorized to play a critical role in the persistence of SAD. A widely established framework in personality psychology suggests that the domains of agency and communion underlie the structure of self-beliefs. However, previous research overlooking this distinction revealed inconsistent findings. The current study examined belief updating in a highly self-relevant context: feedback about core personality traits. Participants (clinically diagnosed individuals with SAD, n = 95; non-clinical controls, NCC, n = 87) completed a social feedback task. In this task, participants learned how others perceived their agentic (e.g., competence and status) and communal (e.g., warmth and connectedness) traits while receiving mostly negative feedback. SAD was characterized by enhanced negative updating of agentic, but not communal, self-beliefs, compared to NCCs. This pattern was still observed when depression severity and initial self-beliefs were statistically controlled. In the SAD group and across the sample, depression severity was linked to enhanced updating in both domains. These updating patterns may perpetuate intrapersonal and interpersonal cycles that maintain negative self-beliefs in these conditions. Integrating the research on the “Big Two” personality dimensions with cognitive and evolutionary theories may help characterize and attenuate biased cognitive processing in SAD.