Breaking away from destructive feedback [paper]

Why would people with a negative self-image prefer to hear unfavorable feedback that reinforces those self-views? A new paper (with Health Psychology Ph.D. students Shaina Glass and Ryan Hall) builds on our work to understand this phenomenon of self-verifying feedback seeking. We gave participants a task in which they chose to receive evaluative feedback from one of two “AI systems” that rated their abilities relative to their peers. These choices were set up so that one AI system gave feedback that aligned with participants’ self-ratings, while the other gave feedback that appeared to contradict their self-views.

There were two key findings from the paper. First, we replicated earlier work showing that people who self-verify are largely motivated by the desire for accurate feedback–in other words, their self-beliefs serve as a framework for judging whether they can trust information from a new feedback source. Second, we show that among people with negative self-views, there were different patterns of associations between emotion regulation habits and their feedback choice. These participants were more likely to seek out favorable feedback—despite the fact that it appeared to conflict with their self-ratings—when they also reported engaging in more proactive forms of emotion regulation (e.g., reappraisal, perspective-taking) in their daily life. This opens the door to future work examining how certain types of emotion regulation might make people more receptive to feedback that challenges existing self-views.

Link to the paper: Glass, S., Hall, R., & Markant, D. B. (2026). Breaking Away From Destructive Feedback: The Role of Emotion Regulation in Negative Self-Verification. Psychological Reports, 00332941261497277. https://doi.org/10.1177/00332941261497277