Aberrant emotional conformity among individuals with social anxiety

Social anxiety (SA) is characterized by heightened fear of negative evaluation and excessive motivation for social belonging, yet the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying aberrant emotional conformity-defined as adjusting one's emotional responses to align with others-remain unclear. This study combined behavioral tasks and event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how social anxiety modulates emotional conformity during social scene evaluations. Forty-four participants (22 high SA, 22 low SA) provided subjective affective ratings of neutral and negative social scenes based on imagining themselves in each situation, before and after receiving peer feedback indicating that peers' ratings were consistent with, more positive than, or more negative than their own initial ratings. Behaviorally, high SA individuals rated neutral scenes more negatively than low SA counterparts at both initial and post-feedback stages, reflecting a generalized negativity bias. Crucially, high SA individuals exhibited heightened conformity to negative peer feedback, significantly downward-adjusting their affective ratings. Neurally, during re-evaluation of negative scenes following discrepant feedback, high SA individuals displayed amplified late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes-a marker of sustained attentional engagement and regulatory effort -specifically in response to lower feedback. Although a significant three-way interaction (Group × Feedback × Valence) was detected for the N400, no post hoc comparisons reached significance, suggesting an interaction that did not yield robust or interpretable simple effects. No other significant N400 effects emerged. These results indicate that social anxiety amplifies sensitivity to negative social feedback, driving maladaptive emotional conformity through enhanced cognitive resource allocation (indexed by LPP). The findings suggest a possible neurocognitive pathway through which biased conformity could contribute to symptom maintenance in social anxiety, offering potential theoretical targets for future interventions aimed at mitigating cognitive rigidity. The distinct role of positively valenced stimuli and feedback within such treatments, however, requires future investigation.