Researchers at UCL have uncovered why individuals who experience anxiety and depression often struggle with persistent low self-belief in their abilities.
A new study, published in Nature Communications, examined two large groups of people (230 and 278 participants) to measure their "confidence" when doing individual jobs and their "self-belief" when judging their overall performance of these individual jobs collectively.
They found that those with symptoms of anxiety and depression tended to build their overall self-belief by focusing their attention on jobs where they thought they didn't perform as strongly (i.e. on low confidence) - rather than also considering jobs where they did perform well (i.e. on high confidence).
In order to gain a better understanding of how participants evaluate themselves (also known as metacognition or their awareness and understanding of their own thought processes), they were asked to complete a computer game, which asked them to help the residents of a fictional town, named "Fruitville", to complete their farming jobs.
These jobs required skills involving fine-grained vision (to distinguish different fruits) as well as memory (to remember which fruits were picked). For each completed job, participants were also asked to report their confidence in their performance.
Then at the end of each session of the game, they reported how well they thought they performed on the entire session (i.e. overall self-belief about their ability).
During the game, an auditor occasionally appeared to give people feedback on how well they were doing.
The researchers found that people with stronger symptoms of anxiety and depression did not differ in their performance on the games than those with less strong symptoms.
They also found that positive feedback boosted overall self-belief, and negative feedback reduced it in all participants - regardless of whether they had symptoms of anxiety or depression.
However, people with stronger symptoms of anxiety and depression still had lower overall self-belief. This is because they tended to ignore those jobs within the game where they felt confident in their choices and instead, focused on times when they were less confident.
This reduced sensitivity to their own confidence helps explain why people with certain mental health conditions have persistent low self-belief - despite their actual performance not differing from others and despite receiving similarly positive feedback.
Lead author, Dr Sucharit Katyal who completed the work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research and is currently at the University of Copenhagen, said: "Overall, our findings offer a simple yet powerful message - that the persistent negative self-beliefs experienced by people with anxiety and depression are often illusory, and may be rooted in a dysfunctional view of how they evaluate themselves . This would also explain why anxiety and depression symptoms are also closely linked to imposter syndrome where some people persistently doubt their achievements despite being competent.
"When forming beliefs about ourselves, we should take our own metacognitive estimates with a pinch of salt, and perhaps adequately rely on the feedback provided by others."
The researchers now hope that their findings will help pave the way for more effective interventions and support strategies for people with anxiety and depression.
Dr Katyal said: "By understanding how these individuals respond differently to their own performance and feedback, we can develop better strategies to support them in building and maintaining confidence - so they can flourish in the workplace and beyond."
