Self-Belief Updating Under Stress as a Transdiagnostic Mechanism of Internalizing Psychopathology

Social anxiety, generalized anxiety, and depression are prevalent, debilitating, and highly comorbid forms of internalizing psychopathology. Identifying transdiagnostic mechanisms underlying these conditions is critical for improving prevention and intervention efforts. Daily life is inherently dynamic, requiring individuals to continuously integrate environmental feedback to update their beliefs. Accordingly, belief updating has been conceptualized as a core process supporting adaptive functioning (Kube, 2023; Sharot et al., 2023) and has been implicated in depression and both generalized and social anxiety disorders (Beltzer et al., 2019; Deng et al., 2023; Everaert et al., 2018, 2020, 2021; Gadassi Polack et al., 2023; Glazier et al., 2019; Hopkins et al., 2021; Koban et al., 2017, 2023; Müller-Pinzler et al., 2019; Zabag et al., 2022). However, most existing work has focused on cross-sectional associations between self-belief updating and affective psychopathology and has often relied on comparisons between clinical/high-symptom groups and control/low-symptom groups. For example, compared to control groups, individuals with social anxiety disorder update their self-evaluations and state self-esteem more strongly in response to negative than positive social feedback (Koban et al., 2023). While such findings provide initial evidence for biased self-belief updating, characterized by increased negative updating and reduced positive updating, these designs limit inferences about temporal precedence and longitudinal prediction. Moreover, although belief updating has received substantial attention as a fundamental information-integration process, less is known about how information one receives in life (e.g., stressors) interacts with biased self-belief updating. From a theoretical standpoint, biased self-belief updating may be particularly consequential in contexts characterized by elevated exposure to stressful events. Such stressful events, when coupled with biased self-belief updating, may increase the likelihood of sustained or worsening internalizing symptoms over time. Nevertheless, prospective evidence linking biased self-belief updating to longitudinal changes in social anxiety, generalized anxiety, and depression, particularly across different levels of stress exposure, remains limited. In the present study, we address these gaps using a longitudinal design with a laboratory-based assessment of belief updating, baseline measures of psychopathology, and follow-up assessments of stressful life events and psychopathology four months later. Specifically, we employ a self-evaluation and feedback task following social evaluative stress in the laboratory (Koban et al., 2023) to capture updating of (a) global self-esteem (hereafter referred to as affective updating, modeled using an adapted Rescorla–Wagner learning model) and (b) domain-specific performance beliefs (hereafter referred to as belief updating, modeled using linear change from initial self-evaluation to self-evaluation following feedback). We examine: (Aim 1) concurrent associations between self-belief updating and internalizing psychopathology (replication aim), (Aim 2) longitudinal associations between self-belief updating and changes in internalizing psychopathology, and (Aim 3) whether self-belief updating more strongly predicts future psychopathology among individuals exposed to greater life stress.