Cognitive Mechanisms of Feedback-seeking decisions along Social Anxiety

Social anxiety disorder is characterized by an intense fear of negative evaluation in social situations (Morrison & Heimberg, 2013). Socially anxious individuals exhibit several biases pertaining to self-referential social information, including biases in seeking and processing feedback about themselves from others. For instance, they engage in excessive reassurance-seeking and (paradoxically) negative feedback-seeking from close others (Heerey & Kring, 2007). They also exhibit an aversion to positive social evaluation, as demonstrated by increased anxiety upon receiving positive as compared to “absence of negative” feedback (Alden et al., 2008). However, the cognitive mechanisms that govern active decisions to seek or avoid self-evaluative feedback, and their variations along social anxiety symptoms, remain unclear. Here, we propose to test whether expectations of the feedback-seeker about their performance, as well as directness of the feedback-giver, influence feedback-seeking decisions. Through this study, we aim to understand how socially anxious (and non-anxious) individuals actively decide to seek or not seek performance feedback from others about their performance on a simple, perceptual decision-making task. We investigate this choice of seeking feedback as a function of several factors such as confidence and certainty about one’s own task performance, the directness of the feedback to be received and self-perceived feedback instrumentality. We hope that our study will lead to a better understanding of the domain-general dysfunctions in self-evaluative information-seeking in social anxiety. It will also help discern the factors that contribute to safety behaviours like excessive reassurance seeking in SAD. In the long run, this may aid in better diagnosis and treatment of the disorder.