No abstract

Studies demonstrated that faces with threatening emotional expressions are better remembered than non-threatening faces. However, whether this memory advantage persists over years and which neural systems underlie such an effect remains unknown. Here, we employed an individual difference approach to examine whether the neural activity during incidental encoding was associated with differential recognition of faces with emotional expressions (angry, fearful, happy, sad and neutral) after a retention interval of > 1.5 years (N = 89). Behaviorally, we found a better recognition for threatening (angry, fearful) versus non-threatening (happy and neutral) faces after a > 1.5 years delay, which was driven by forgetting of non-threatening faces compared with immediate recognition after encoding. Multivariate principal component analysis (PCA) on the behavioral responses further con rmed the discriminative recognition performance between threatening and non-threatening faces. A voxel-wise whole-brain analysis on the concomitantly acquired functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) data during incidental encoding revealed that neural activity in bilateral inferior occipital gyrus (IOG) and ventromedial prefrontal/orbitofrontal cortex (vmPFC/OFC) was associated with the individual differences in the discriminative emotional face recognition performance measured by an innovative behavioral pattern similarity analysis (BPSA) based on inter-subject correlation (ISC). The left fusiform face area (FFA) was additionally determined using a regionally focused analysis. Overall, the present study provides evidence that threatening facial expressions lead to persistent face recognition over periods of > 1.5 years and differential encodingrelated activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and occipito-temporal cortex may underlie this effect.

Loneliness has been associated with detrimental effects on mental and physical health and is increasingly recognized as a critical public health issue which may be further exacerbated by societal challenges such as increasing urbanization, an aging society as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. We here review recent findings on the neurocognitive mechanisms and brain alterations that underpin social disconnectedness, therapeutic approaches for chronic loneliness and how these lines of research can be integrated to improve the efficacy of loneliness interventions in healthy individuals and patients with mental disorders.