Schedule of Events | Symposia

Neural synchrony during movie-watching predicts mixed feelings

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Rishab S Iyer^1,2 (rsiyer@princeton.edu), Anthony G Vaccaro², Helen Wu², Shruti Shakthivel², Jonas T Kaplan²; ¹Princeton University, ²University of Southern California

In our everyday lives, we experience a rich, complex set of emotions. Understanding the neural basis of these emotions is a central goal of affective neuroscience, but progress has been slowed by experimental designs that do not evoke the multidimensional, interwoven emotions we experience every day. Using naturalistic movie-watching paradigms, we can induce such a range of emotions, allowing us to probe not only univalent but also mixed emotions that are a critical yet understudied part of the human experience. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study 27 participants who watched two animated short videos that were selected for their ability to consistently elicit strong emotions in a separate sample. After scanning, the same participants reported their emotional responses: “positive”, “negative”, or “mixed”, continuously during a rewatch. We hypothesized that if multiple participants reported the same emotion at the same point in time, we should be able to observe shared neural processing underpinning this subjectively reported consensus. We tested whether neural synchrony in predefined cortical and subcortical regions of interest predicts positive, negative, and mixed emotional consensus. Using intersubject correlation, we found that neural synchrony in the auditory cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, posterior cingulate, insula, and amygdala is predictive of the group’s consensus on univalent emotions. Furthermore, neural synchrony in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala was predictive of mixed emotional consensus. These results suggest that mixed emotions are represented variably across cortical and subcortical regions and provide support for hierarchical emotional processing in the brain.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions