Tohoku University Cognitive Neuroscience Application Center

The direction of the relation between facial emotion recognition and loneliness has been showed to be mixed in the previous literature. However, among those studies, some suggested lonely people actually have the sufficient recognition ability, but fail to do it under social pressure. Currently, the relation under social pressure has been shown on the behavior level, but the neural mechanism underlying the failure has not been elucidated yet.
We replicated the previous behavior finding on sad face recognition; its accuracy was not predicted by loneliness per se, but was predicted by the interaction between loneliness and social pressure. Difference in activity of Fusiform gyrus and amygdala were found suggesting that the combination of facial and threat processing may underlie the recognition failure of sad face by lonely people under pressure. Denilson Brilliant, student of Graduate School of Medicine presented these findings in a poster titled “The Effect of Social Pressure on Facial Emotion Recognition in Lonely People and Its Neural Mechanism” In the International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience – ICON2025 (September 15-20, 2025), Porto, Portugal.
In this conference, he met and had discussions with international researcher after participating in their symposiums, and also discussed and exchanged ideas with other poster presenters. This conference is a great opportunity to widen his research network. Last but not least, he also enjoyed the food and scenery in Porto after attending the conference every day.
(Sugiura)

Denilson Brilliant T , Ayumi Takemoto, Shachihiro Shirahama, Kazufumi Karube, Lingfei Guan, Motoaki Sugiura
The Effect of Social Pressure on Facial Emotion Recognition in Lonely People and Its Neural Mechanism
International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON 2025), Porto, Portugal, September 15–20, 2025【 Poster 】
https://icon2025.pt/