Recall, response bias and recognition are differentially impacted by social anxiety irrespective of feedback modality

This study replicates and extends Houle-Johnson et al.'s (2019) findings to better understand the role of feedback modality, ambiguity and social anxiety in the recognition and recall of self-relevant feedback.

Participants gave a speech and were provided with positive, negative, and ambiguous feedback via written text, (n = 33) or recorded sentences (n = 31) and later completed a recognition and recall task for the feedback.

Recognition (p = .80, η_p² = 0) and recall (p = .09, η_p² = 0.08) did not differ between written or recorded feedback. All participants demonstrated a negative response bias (p < .001, η_p² = 0.22) and recalled more negative than positive feedback (p = .02, η_p² = 0.10) but were no more accurate in recognizing negative compared to positive feedback (p = .08, η_p² = 0). Although social anxiety did not impact recognition accuracy (p = .94, η_p² = 0), participants with high social anxiety demonstrated a more pronounced negative response bias (p < .01, η_p² = 0.11) and negative recall bias (p = .02, SE = 1.12) than low social anxiety participants. Moreover, the more negatively ambiguous items were perceived, the more likely they were identified old in the high social anxiety group, whereas the opposite was true for the low social anxiety group (B = .13, p < .10).

Task believability was relatively low across all participants.

Our findings suggest that modality does not influence memory for feedback. Moreover, social anxiety might be characterized by a negative bias in recall and response bias, but not necessarily increased accuracy in recognition of negative feedback.