The Anxious Brain Remembers Negativity: The Potential Role of Theta Oscillations in Linking Performance Monitoring to Incidental Memory Biases in Social Anxiety: Kianoosh Hosseini Ghalebin's Dissertation Defense

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UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL BULLETIN

ANNOUNCEMENT

Florida International University

University Graduate School

Doctoral Dissertation Defense

Abstract

The Anxious Brain Remembers Negativity: The Potential Role of Theta Oscillations in Linking Performance Monitoring to Incidental Memory Biases in Social Anxiety

by

Kianoosh Hosseini Ghalebin

Social anxiety (SA) is characterized by enhanced monitoring of one’s own performance errors, yet it remains unclear whether and how this heightened monitoring contributes to the maintenance of SA. This dissertation tested the proposal that heightened error monitoring in SA biases what is incidentally encoded into memory during moments of perceived failure, with theta oscillations serving as both an index of monitoring and a candidate mechanism linking monitoring to encoding.

Chapter 2 reviewed the literature on neural oscillations in incidental learning. It proposed a working memory (WM)-based framework in which theta, alongside oscillations within other frequency bands (alpha, beta, and gamma), governs the gating, filtering, and maintenance of information that is subsequently encoded into long-term memory. This established a mechanistic baseline against which the SA-specific findings could be interpreted. Chapter 3 tested whether the proposed error-related memory bias is specific to social stimuli using a modified Flanker task with trial-unique face or object background images, followed by a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test. Higher SA symptoms predicted an enhanced Memory Bias for Error Events, replicating prior work. Critically, this bias was specific to faces and absent for objects, indicating selective encoding of social information during error events. Chapter 4 examined whether this mechanism generalizes from self-detected errors to externally delivered negative feedback using an adaptive time-estimation task with EEG. Higher SA severity predicted greater negative feedback-related medial frontal cortex (MFC)–sensory theta connectivity, generalizing the neural association across self-detected and external feedback paradigms, though this effect was conditional on depressive symptoms. However, neither SA severity nor theta connectivity predicted a memory bias for negative feedback events, suggesting that heightened monitoring is not by itself sufficient to bias encoding.

Together, these findings indicate that error-related memory biases in SA are socially specific, and that the link between monitoring and memory formation may depend on boundary conditions that were met in some paradigms but not others. Thus, these findings help refine models of how performance monitoring contributes to the maintenance of SA.

Date: December 01, 2026

Department: Psychology

Time: 09:30 a.m.

Major Professor: Dr. George A. Buzzell

Place: MMC Campus, AHC1 and Room 110

Zoom (only for guests): https://short.do/xre60I