Frontal midline theta tracks negatively biased affective updating in social anxiety from adolescence to young adulthood
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Negative self-beliefs are a core feature of social anxiety, yet the neurocomputational processes that translate social-evaluative feedback into biased self-beliefs remain poorly understood. Here we examined whether frontal-midline theta (FM-theta) - an EEG signature of performance monitoring – governs how performance-based prediction errors (PEs) are incorporated into updating self-feelings based on performance feedback (i.e., affective updating). A sample of 216 adolescents and young adults (174 female; mean age 18.4 years) participated in a speech performance task during which participants provided a short speech that was evaluated by three judges. After the speech, participants were asked to appraise their own performance on the same evaluative items used by the judges. After their appraisal on each item, participants were provided with the judge’s evaluation and were subsequently asked to indicate how they felt based on the feedback received. We found that participants updated their self-feelings more strongly based on positive than negative feedback, and that this positive affective updating bias weakened with age. As hypothesized, participants with elevated social anxiety displayed more negative affective updating, and social anxiety fully mediated the age-related decline in positive affective updating. Critically, in individuals with elevated social anxiety, the magnitude of negative performance feedback was associated with stronger FM-theta modulated negative affective updating. These findings corroborate previous positive affective updating biases in healthy individuals and furthermore underscore a key role of FM-theta oscillations in feedback-guided affective updating, potentially reinforcing negative self-belief in individuals with elevated social anxiety.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7212451735