Anxiety Makes You Not See Your Own Triumphs
- Lidi Garcia
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
The study investigated how anxiety and depression affect how people form confidence, especially when receiving feedback about their performance. The researchers found that, compared to people without these symptoms, people with anxiety and depression tend to focus more on criticism than on praise. This makes their confidence more affected by negative feedback, even when they perform well.
In recent years, researchers have made great strides in understanding how people form confidence in themselves and others, especially when it comes to making decisions about the future. Forming this confidence involves a series of mental calculations, but it is still unclear how these processes work in people with symptoms of anxiety and depression.
One interesting idea is that, for these people, confidence may be influenced by a tendency to focus more on negative information than positive information when making predictions about the future, especially regarding themselves. In other words, they may have a more negative view of their abilities and what to expect in situations, which can affect their confidence.
Recent studies have found that people with symptoms of anxiety and depression tend to focus more on negative experiences than positive ones, especially when they are trying to learn from what happened in the past or when they receive feedback about their performance.
This tendency can cause them to distort the feedback they receive, being more impacted by criticism than praise. In other words, when forming an overall sense of their own confidence, these people may be more influenced by negative feedback than by positive feedback, which can affect their confidence in themselves.
In addition, this can affect how they view their self-esteem, which is a broader belief about their personal worth. These influences can extend beyond specific tasks and affect their overall view of themselves.
In this study, researchers at University College London wanted to understand how people with symptoms of anxiety and depression form their overall confidence, especially compared to those who do not have these symptoms. They manipulated the feedback people received about their performance to see how it affected their confidence.
Using a computational model, the researchers were able to identify different ways in which symptoms of anxiety and depression alter how people respond to feedback and how this affects their confidence.
For example, people with symptoms of anxiety and depression might be more sensitive to negative feedback, or they might have a general negative response bias, meaning they tend to interpret feedback more unfavorably, even when the feedback is not that negative. These mechanisms were tested in two separate experiments, using tasks that involved different types of cognitive skills, such as perception and memory.
The goal was to see whether the impact of feedback on people’s confidence applied not only to a specific task, but also to broader areas of affective self-evaluation, that is, how people feel about themselves after receiving that feedback.
The first part of the study was conducted with a group of 230 people, while the second part involved a group of 278 people. Before starting the experiments, the researchers had already recorded their hypotheses and analysis plans to ensure transparency and validity of the results.
The results of both experiments showed that feedback had a big impact on people’s overall confidence and also affected their subsequent emotional self-evaluations. In simple terms, this means that people changed how they viewed their own confidence after receiving feedback about their performance.
However, a key finding was that people with more intense symptoms of anxiety and depression showed a different response to feedback. While they were still sensitive to the type of feedback (positive or negative), they were less sensitive to increases in local confidence, meaning that even when the feedback was positive, their confidence did not increase as much.
These results help explain why people with anxiety and depression often remain insecure even when they perform well. In other words, they may not benefit as much from positive feedback as people without these symptoms, which may contribute to persistent feelings of insecurity and lack of confidence.
READ MORE:
Distorted learning from local metacognition supports transdiagnostic underconfidence
Sucharit Katyal, Quentin JM Huys, Raymond J. Dolan & Stephen M. Fleming
Nature Communications, volume 16, Article number: 1854 (2025)
Abstract
Individuals experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression have been shown to exhibit persistent underconfidence. The origin of such metacognitive biases presents a puzzle, given that individuals should be able to learn appropriate levels of confidence from observing their own performance. In two large general population samples (N = 230 and N = 278), we measure both 'local' confidence in individual task instances and 'global' confidence as longer-run self-performance estimates while manipulating external feedback. Global confidence is sensitive to both local confidence and feedback valence—more frequent positive (negative) feedback increases (respectively decreases) global confidence, with asymmetries in feedback also leading to shifts in affective self-beliefs. Notably, however, global confidence exhibits reduced sensitivity to instances of higher local confidence in individuals with greater subclinical anxious-depression symptomatology, despite sensitivity to feedback valence remaining intact. Our finding of blunted sensitivity to increases in local confidence offers a mechanistic basis for how persistent underconfidence is maintained in the face of intact performance.
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