Revealing dichotomous prior biases in social anxiety through a social prism model
Yuxi Wang, Qianqian Ju, Renhe Jia, Minghao Yuan, Yujia Peng · 2026
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Description
Yuxi Wang and four colleagues propose a Social Prism Model to explain why people with social anxiety read the same social moment so differently from others. Working inside a Bayesian frame, where the brain weighs prior expectations against fresh evidence, they ran eight experiments. The experiments tested how people judge the emotional tone of social cues, and they involved 541 participants.
Anxious participants processed incoming evidence normally. What differed was expectation: they carried two strong prior biases at once. One was a negative lean tied to intolerance of uncertainty and fear of judgement. The other was an over-positive lean tied to negative social learning. Computer simulations showed how shifting those prior settings alone reproduces biased judgements, placing expectation, not perception, at the heart of anxious interpretation.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Yuxi Wang, Qianqian Ju, Renhe Jia, Minghao Yuan, Yujia Peng |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 59 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |