ArticleScientific reports2019
Negativity-bias in forming beliefs about own abilities.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 65 citations in OpenAlex.
- The neuroscience of social feelings: mechanisms of adaptive social functioning.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Pooled it
- Aberrant insula activity to negative and reduced learning from positive feedback underlie maladaptive self-beliefs in depression.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- I Think, Therefore I Change: Reflection Leads to Self-Concept Change After Discrepant Feedback.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2026Article
- Causal attributions shape the formation of novel ability self-beliefs.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- The neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the impact of social comparison on effort investment.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Interoceptive NeuroEmpowerment Scale: a trauma-informed measure of adaptive state ownership.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Rewards bias self-evaluations of ability.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Perceptual metacognition and self-esteem: the role of feedback valence in local and global monitoring bias.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Exploring Asymmetries in Self-Concept Change After Discrepant Feedback.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2025Article
- Differential effects of social feedback valence and self-relevance on brain responses and behaviour.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Initial Expectations and Confidence Affect the Formation of Novel Self-Beliefs and Their Revision.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- A newly detected bias in self-evaluation.PloS one · 2024Article
- Brain mediators of biased social learning of self-perception in social anxiety disorder.Translational psychiatry · 2023Article
- Facial mimicry and metacognitive judgments in emotion recognition are distinctly modulated by social anxiety and autistic traits.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Negativity drives online news consumption.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Neurocomputational mechanisms of affected beliefs.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Interactions between attributions and beliefs at trial-by-trial level: Evidence from a novel computer game task.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- A simple cognitive method to improve the prediction of matters of taste by exploiting the within-person wisdom-of-crowd effect.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- A corticostriatal pathway mediating self-efficacy enhancement.Npj mental health research · 2022Article
- Threat induction biases processing of emotional expressions.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
During everyday interactions people constantly receive feedback on their behavior, which shapes their beliefs about themselves. While classic studies in the field of social learning suggest that people have a tendency to learn better from good news (positivity bias) when they perceive little opportunities to immediately improve their own performance, we show updating is biased towards negative information when participants perceive the opportunity to adapt their performance during learning. In three consecutive experiments we applied a computational modeling approach on the subjects' learning behavior and reveal the negativity bias was specific for learning about own compared to others' performances and was modulated by prior beliefs about the self, i.e. stronger negativity bias in individuals lower in self-esteem. Social anxiety affected self-related negativity biases only when individuals were exposed to a judging audience thereby potentially explaining the persistence of negative self-images in socially anxious individuals which commonly surfaces in social settings. Self-related belief formation is therefore surprisingly negatively biased in situations suggesting opportunities to improve and this bias is shaped by trait differences in self-esteem and social anxiety.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.