Biased information-seeking and information-integration in social anxiety

Abstract

Social anxiety is associated with an intense fear of social evaluation and rejection, often leading to avoidance behaviors and distress. In this review, we summarize the current understanding of how various cognitive biases may lead to the development and maintenance of social anxiety. While early models of social anxiety have focused on negative biases in perception, attention, memory and emotion regulation, more recent literature has started to characterize biases in information-seeking and information-integration, especially in the context of self-referential information and social feedback. We also highlight directions for future work, including characterizing how different biases in social anxiety relate to each other, and how they may help dissociate social anxiety symptoms from co-occurring conditions such as generalized anxiety and depression.