Loneliness is a public health concern with detrimental effects on physical and mental well-being. Given phenotypical overlaps between loneliness and social anxiety (SA), cognitive-behavioral interventions targeting SA might be adopted to reduce loneliness. However, whether SA and loneliness share the same underlying neurocognitive mechanisms is still an elusive question. The current study aimed at investigating to what extent known behavioral and neural correlates of social avoidance in SA are evident in loneliness. We used a pre-stratified approach involving 42 (21 females) participants with high loneliness (HL) and 40 (20 females) participants with low loneliness (LL) scores. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants completed a social gambling task to measure the subjective value of engaging in social situations and responses to social feedback. Uni- and multivariate analyses of behavioral and neural data replicated known task effects. However, although HL participants showed increased ...