ArticleScientific reports2022
Self-esteem depends on beliefs about the rate of change of social approval.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- When Collaboration Falters, Insensitivity to How Our Actions Affect Others Drives Inflated Self-evaluations.Computational brain & behavior · 2026Article
- Computational models of subjective feelings in psychiatry.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A major challenge in understanding the neurobiological basis of psychiatric disorders is rigorously quantifying subjective metrics that lie at the core of mental illness, such as low self-esteem. Self-esteem can be conceptualized as a 'gauge of social approval' that increases in response to approval and decreases in response to disapproval. Computational studies have shown that learning signals that represent the difference between received and expected social approval drive changes in self-esteem. However, it is unclear whether self-esteem based on social approval should be understood as a value updated through associative learning, or as a belief about approval, updated by new evidence depending on how strongly it is held. Our results show that belief-based models explain self-esteem dynamics in response to social evaluation better than associative learning models. Importantly, they suggest that in the short term, self-esteem signals the direction and rate of change of one's beliefs about approval within a group, rather than one's social position.
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What OpenQuestion holds
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.