Understanding how social interactions shape an organism’s behavior, specifically the approach and avoidance tendencies towards interaction partners associated with reward or threat, is a crucial mechanism. The current project aimed to investigate these processes through a novel social conditioning procedure combined with a social approach test that shares key features with comparable protocols in the animal literature (Toth et al., 2012).
Participants had the opportunity to freely navigate a virtual reality (VR) scenario using a locomotion platform. Within this VR environment, they encountered two agents who reacted either in a friendly or unfriendly way to the participant’s presence. After this social conditioning, we investigated whether participants adapt their behavior in a subsequent test phase.
Overall, we observed significant effects of the social conditioning procedure on autonomic responses and participants’ exploration behavior. After initially increased attention, participants exhibited avoidance of social threats as indicated by a higher interpersonal distance and decreased visual attention towards the negatively conditioned virtual agent in the test phase. We found no association between hypervigilance and trait social anxiety but observed higher fear ratings and enhanced avoidance of social threats in participants with elevated anxiety levels. Altogether, this study demonstrates the potential of immersive virtual environments for examining social learning processes under conditions resembling real-life social encounters.
In the next step, we aim to extend these findings in two directions: (1) In addition to individuals with social anxiety, we will include participants with a history of peer victimization to examine both the shared and distinct effects of social anxiety and peer victimization. To this end, we will employ a fully crossed design comparing individuals with and without social anxiety and with and without a history of peer victimization. (2) We will introduce a counter-conditioning phase in which participants re-encounter the previously unpleasant interaction partner, who now behaves in a friendly manner and offers an apology. This phase is designed to allow for the reversal of the previously acquired negative association. Prior research has shown that individuals with social anxiety often demonstrate reduced flexibility in updating negative interpersonal beliefs (Zabag et al., 2023), a pattern that may similarly extend to those with a history of peer victimization.
Collaborators: Matthias Gamer, Tina Lonsdorf, Benjamin Iffland
