Examining social reinforcement learning in social anxiety.

ABSTRACT:

Background and objectives

Reinforcement learning biases have been empirically linked to anhedonia in depression and theoretically linked to social anhedonia in social anxiety disorder, but little work has directly assessed how socially anxious individuals learn from social reward and punishment.

Methods

N = 157 individuals high and low in social anxiety symptoms completed a social probabilistic selection task that involved selecting between pairs of neutral faces with varying probabilities of changing to a happy or angry face. Computational modeling was performed to estimate learning rates. Accuracy in choosing the more rewarding face was also analyzed.

Results

No significant group differences were found for learning rates. Contrary to hypotheses, participants high in

SUBMITTER: Beltzer ML 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10227359 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature