These findings may have significant implications for our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the development and maintenance of negative self-beliefs commonly observed in depression.

Also, individuals with higher levels of depression and lower self-esteem showed a stronger negativity bias during the learning pride process.

Drawing on a computational model that incorporates prediction error valence and causal attributions, we found that participants updated their self-beliefs less when feedback was attributed to external causes.

In this study, the lab’s Learning-of-own-performance (LOOP) task (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2019) has been adapted to examine how people attribute self-related feedback during the formation of novel self-related ability beliefs.

These findings may inform our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the development and maintenance of negative self-beliefs commonly observed in depression.