Anxiety traits can manifest as a tendency to overlook positive information, impacting memory and decision-making. Using EEG-based neural decoding, we examined future reward prediction in participants with varying levels of trait anxiety. In a resting period, following value learning, we found an increase in reverse replay for a task sequence that led to reward. This reward-related replay was significantly reduced within individuals exhibiting higher trait anxiety. Furthermore, this reduction correlated with a distorted neural representation of the reward-predictive sequence, an effect mirrored behaviorally in an attenuated preference for stimuli within the same sequence. These findings indicate that higher trait anxiety may impede formation of reward-predictive representations by reducing offline replay during rest. More broadly, our demonstration of sequential replay using EEG enables examination of offline learning and memory consolidation in wider populations, particularly those with psychopathology.

The Coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) and measures to curb it created population-level changes in male-dominant impulsive and risky behaviors such as violent crimes and gambling. One possible explanation for this is that the pandemic has been stressful, and males, more so than females, tend to respond to stress by altering their focus on immediate versus delayed rewards, as reflected in their delay discounting rates. Delay discounting rates from healthy undergraduate students were collected twice during the pandemic. Discounting rates of males (n=190) but not of females (n=493) increased during the pandemic. Using machine learning, we show that prepandemic functional connectome predict increased discounting rates in males (n=88). Moreover, considering that delay discounting is associated with multiple psychiatric disorders, we found the same neural pattern that predicted increased discounting rates in this study, in secondary datasets of patients with major depression and schizophrenia. The findings point to sex-based differences in maladaptive delay discounting under real-world stress events, and to connectome-based neuromarkers of such effects. They can explain why there was a population-level increase in several impulsive and risky behaviors during the pandemic and point to intriguing questions about the shared underlying mechanisms of stress responses, psychiatric disorders and delay discounting.

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