The update of interpersonal beliefs in everyday life situations in relation to depressive symptoms and state affect – An ecological momentary assessment proof-of-principle study

Previous research has provided valuable insights into associations of belief updating with aspects of psychopathology. However, prior work was mostly based on laboratory studies or scenario-based tasks. Thus, applications to everyday life situations are unclear. To address this limitation, the present study employed an Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) design to examine change in interpersonal expectations following interpersonal experiences and its relationship with depressive symptoms, assessed once at baseline. After a baseline assessment, a non-clinical sample (N = 43, age 18–66, 67 % female) indicated their interpersonal expectations in the morning and actual interpersonal experiences as well as updated expectations in the evening over 18 days. Multi-level modelling shows that, consistent with associative learning models, participants updated their beliefs the more, the greater the expectation-outcome discrepancy was – irrespective of the valence of the discrepancy. When considering the valence of the expectation-outcome discrepancy, participants updated their beliefs more towards better-than-expected than towards worse-than-expected experiences, in line with the optimistic update bias. Depressive symptoms were associated with increased updating in a negative direction after worse-than-expected experiences, but not with reduced updating in a positive direction after better-than-expected experiences. These findings provide proof-of-principle evidence for investigating biased belief updating using EMA.