Khalid Iraj, Morlaas Orphee, Bottemanne Hugo, Thonon Lisa, Da Costa Thomas, Fossati Philippe, Schmidt Liane
Control-interception-attention team, Paris Brain Institute (ICM), UMR 7225, U1127, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/Sorbonne Universités, Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France.
Département de Psychiatrie Adulte, Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Assistance Publique Hôpitaux de Paris (APHP), Paris, France.
Elife. 2025 Jun 30;13:RP101157. doi: 10.7554/eLife.101157.
Optimistically biased belief updating is essential for mental health and resilience in adversity. Here, we asked how experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic affected optimism biases in updating beliefs about the future. One hundred and twenty-three participants estimated the risk of experiencing adverse future life events in the face of belief-disconfirming evidence either outside the pandemic (n=58) or during the pandemic (n=65). While belief updating was optimistically biased and Reinforcement-learning-like outside the pandemic, the bias faded, and belief updating became more rational Bayesian-like during the pandemic. This malleability of anticipating the future during the COVID-19 pandemic was further underpinned by a lower integration of positive belief-disconfirming information, fewer but stronger negative estimations, and more confidence in base rates. The findings offer a window into the putative cognitive mechanisms of belief updating during the COVID-19 pandemic, driven more by quantifying the uncertainty of the future than by the motivational salience of optimistic outlooks.
乐观偏向的信念更新对于心理健康和逆境中的恢复力至关重要。在此，我们探讨了经历新冠疫情如何影响人们在更新对未来的信念时的乐观偏向。123名参与者在面对与信念不符的证据时，估计了未来经历不良生活事件的风险，这些证据要么来自疫情之外（n = 58），要么来自疫情期间（n = 65）。在疫情之外，信念更新存在乐观偏向且类似强化学习，但在疫情期间，这种偏向减弱，信念更新变得更像理性的贝叶斯方式。在新冠疫情期间对未来预期的这种可塑性，进一步体现在对与信念不符的积极信息的整合减少、负面估计数量减少但强度增加以及对基础概率更有信心。这些发现为新冠疫情期间信念更新的假定认知机制提供了一个窗口，其更多地是由量化未来的不确定性驱动，而非乐观前景的动机显著性。
