Social Feedback Biases Emerge During Recall but Not Prediction: Relevance for the Development of Social Anxiety

Memory is a reconstructive process that can result in events being recalled as more positive or negative than they actually were. While positive recall biases may contribute to well-being, negative recall biases may promote internalizing symptoms, such as social anxiety. Adolescence is characterized by increased salience of peers and peak incidence of social anxiety. Symptoms often wax and wane before becoming more intractable during adulthood. Open questions remain regarding how and when biases for social feedback are expressed, and how individual differences in biases may contribute to social anxiety across development. Two studies used a novel social feedback and cued response task to assess biases about being liked or disliked when retrieving memories versus making predictions. Findings revealed a robust positivity bias about memories for social feedback, regardless of whether memories were true or false. Moreover, memory bias was associated with social anxiety in a developmentally sensitive way. Among adults (Study 1), more severe symptoms of social anxiety were associated with a negativity bias. During the transition from adolescence to adulthood (Study 2), age strengthened the positivity bias in those with less severe symptoms and strengthened the negativity bias in those with more severe symptoms. These patterns of bias were isolated to perceived memory retrieval and did not generalize to predictions about social feedback. These results provide initial support for a model by which schemas may infiltrate perceptions of memory for past, but not predictions of future, social events, shaping susceptibility for social anxiety, particularly during the transition into adulthood.