Investigating the replicability of neural mechanisms underlying anxiety-attenuated encoding of emotional faces

Description: Anxiety involves anticipating aversive outcomes and can impair neurocognitive processes, such as the ability to recall faces encoded during the anxious state. It is important to delineate and determine the replicability of these effects using induced anxiety in the general population, to understand its manifestation in anxiety disorders. This study therefore aimed to replicate prior research on the distinct impacts of threat-of-shock-induced anxiety on the encoding and recognition stage of emotional face processing, in a large asymptomatic sample (n=92). We successfully replicated previous results demonstrating impaired recognition of faces encoded under threat-of-shock. This was supported by a meta- and mega-analysis across three independent studies using the same paradigm (n=211). Underlying this, a wholebrain fMRI analysis revealed enhanced activation in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), alongside previously seen activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) when combined in a mega-analysis with the fMRI findings we aimed to replicate. We further found replications of hippocampus activation when the retrieval and encoding states were congruent. Our results support the notion that anxiety disrupts face recognition, potentially due to attentional demands of anxious arousal competing with affective stimuli processing during encoding and suggest that regions of the cingulate cortex play pivotal roles in this.