From early vigilance to sustained bias: Temporal dynamics of social evaluative feedback processing modulated by fear of positive evaluation.

Fear of positive evaluation (FPE), a core cognitive feature of social anxiety disorder (SAD), is posited to drive maladaptive responses to social feedback, yet its neurocognitive underpinnings remain poorly understood. This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how FPE modulates neural dynamics during social feedback processing. High- and low-FPE individuals (N = 48) completed a social evaluation perception task, where they received positive or negative feedback from different sources (i.e., human/computer). Individuals exhibited sensitivity to feedback source and valence, which was reflected in several event-related potential components associated with early attention (N1), perceptual integration (P2), reward evaluation (Reward Positivity, RewP), and elaborate processing (Late Positive Potential, LPP). Critically, high-FPE (hFPE) individuals demonstrated heightened early attentional vigilance (enhanced N1 amplitudes) to negative feedback from both human and computer sources, with N1 amplitudes positively correlating with FPES scores. Notably, human-positive feedback also elicited larger N1 amplitudes in the hFPE group, further positively linked to FPES scores. Additionally, hFPE individuals showed sustained processing with negative evaluations, evidenced by enhanced LPP amplitudes for negative feedback compared to low-FPE (lFPE) individuals. Although limited by the non-clinical sample, these findings highlight the distinct neural signatures of FPE and its role in abnormal social feedback processing, particularly suggesting the N1 component may be a potential physiological marker for identifying social anxiety patients with predominant fear of positive evaluation, thereby facilitating targeted therapeutic interventions.