Tohoku University Cognitive Neuroscience Application Center

Lonely people perceive the social world as threatening and avoid social interactions due to biased cognitive process. However, previous study showed mixed findings on how lonely people recognize other’s emotion. Among those studies, some suggested lonely people actually have the sufficient recognition ability, but fail to do it under social pressure. Currently, the neural mechanism underlies the recognition failure under social pressure has not been elucidated yet.
We partially replicated the behavior finding of the previous study; the accuracy of sad face recognition was predicted by the interaction between loneliness and social pressure. We also found activity difference in the facial processing and threat processing area. 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 89^th annual convention of the Japanese Psychological (September 5-7, 2025).

In this conference, He met and exchanged contact information with national and international researcher. He also found and discussed some topics that are far from his own topics but quite interesting in the psychology area during the poster sessions. (Sugiura)

The effect of social pressure framing on facial emotion recognition in lonely people and its neural mechanism
Denilson Brilliant T, Ayumi Takemoto, Shachihiro Shirahama, Kazufumi Karube, Lingfei Guan, Motoaki Sugiura
89th Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association, Tohoku Gakuin University, Sendai: Japan【Poster】
https://pub.confit.atlas.jp/ja/event/jpa2025