Resilience-driven neural synchrony during naturalistic movie watching: an ultra-high field fMRI stud
Poster No:
744
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Shuer Ye1, Leona Bätz1, Avneesh Jain1, Alireza Salami2, Maryam Ziaei1
Institutions:
1Norwegian University of Science and Technology, TRONDHEIM, Norway, 2Karolinska Institutet & Umeå University, Stockholm, Stockholm
First Author:
Co-Author(s):
Introduction:
In today's world, frequent traumatic events pose a significant challenge to psychological well-being. This underscore the crucial role of psychological resilience, which is the capacity to effectively navigate and cope with adversity. Resilience empowers individuals to perceive and regulate emotions adaptively, offering a safeguard against detrimental consequences (Denckla et al., 2020; Kalisch et al., 2017). Accumulating evidence suggests that neural variations in brain regions involved in emotion regulation and salience detection may serve as neural markers of resilience (Norbury et al., 2023) and personality traits, such as intolerance to uncertainty (IU) may modulate our ability to maintain resilience (Sahib et al., 2023). Movie fMRI offers an ecologically valid opportunity to study resilience in a real-world context (Eickhoff et al., 2020). When individuals watch movies, synchronized brain activities occur, providing opportunities to detect similarities in neural responses (Baek et al., 2022). Currently, our understanding of how resilience gates the way we perceive and process real-life emotional stimuli is limited. This study is the first to explore the influence of resilience on individuals' neural responses to external naturalistic stimuli. Moreover, we further explore the modulation effect of IU, a personality trait that may shape our perception and serve as a risk factor of mood disorder, on the association between resilience and brain synchrony.
Methods:
We presented two movies, one with negative and one with neutral emotional valence to 62 healthy (Mean age of 25.68 ± 4.30 years, 29 females) adults while undergoing brain MRI scans (Figure 1). The resilience scores and IU scores were collected via self-report questionnaires. Inter-subject correlation and inter-subject representational similarity analysis were combined (Chen et al., 2020; Finn et al., 2020) to investigate the association between resilience level and brain-to-brain synchrony while watching movies. Binarized resilience scores (pairs with high or low scores) and resilience similarity (estimated using the Anna Karenina model, which defines similarities based on the lower score in a pair, suggesting that individuals with high resilience scores are similar, whereas those with low scores are more idiosyncratic, i.e., Figure 2C) were calculated. Linear mixed-effect models were applied to predict neural synchrony. Moreover, IU was incorporated into the model to examine its modulatory effect.
·Figure 1. Study paradigm and calculation of inter-subject correlation (ISC).
Results:
Resilience-driven neural synchrony was found in a wider set of regions including the default mode (DMN), control, and dorsal attentional networks, in response to the negative movie compared to the neutral one (Fig. 2b). High-resilience individuals had similar neural activities to their peers, whereas low-resilience individuals showed more variable neural activities (Figure 2d). Additionally, the modulation effect of IU found in that increased IU enhanced the resilience-driven brain synchrony within the DMN when processing negative movie but not in the neutral one.
·Figure 2. Results of dyad-level analyses on the relationship between resilience and neural synchrony.
Conclusions:
Our results corroborate the Anna Karenina model in which it suggests that "all happy families are alike, and all unhappy families are different in their own way". Our findings indicate consistent neural responses among resilient individuals that signify their aligned adaptive emotional processing, which fosters social understanding and connections, ultimately serving as a protecting factor against adversity. Conversely, the variability in neural responses among low-resilience individuals indicates vulnerability to adverse psychological outcomes, potentially associated with maladaptive emotional responses and regulation. Our findings provide novel insights into the mechanisms of resilience, suggesting that maintaining similar selective attention, inhibitory control, and social cognitive functioning in an adaptive way may be the core feature of resilient individuals.
Emotion, Motivation and Social Neuroscience:
Emotional Perception 1
Higher Cognitive Functions:
Higher Cognitive Functions Other 2
Keywords:
Affective Disorders
Emotions
Other - movie-fMRI
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
Provide references using author date format
Chen, G., Taylor, P. A., Qu, X., Molfese, P. J., Bandettini, P. A., Cox, R. W., & Finn, E. S. (2020). Untangling the relatedness among correlations, part III: Inter-subject correlation analysis through Bayesian multilevel modeling for naturalistic scanning. NeuroImage, 216, 116474. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116474
Denckla, C. A., Cicchetti, D., Kubzansky, L. D., Seedat, S., Teicher, M. H., Williams, D. R., & Koenen, K. C. (2020). Psychological resilience: An update on definitions, a critical appraisal, and research recommendations. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 11(1), 1822064. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2020.1822064
Eickhoff, S. B., Milham, M., & Vanderwal, T. (2020). Towards clinical applications of movie fMRI. NeuroImage, 217, 116860. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116860
Finn, E. S., Glerean, E., Khojandi, A. Y., Nielson, D., Molfese, P. J., Handwerker, D. A., & Bandettini, P. A. (2020). Idiosynchrony: From shared responses to individual differences during naturalistic neuroimaging. NeuroImage, 215, 116828. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116828
Kalisch, R., Baker, D. G., Basten, U., Boks, M. P., Bonanno, G. A., Brummelman, E., Chmitorz, A., Fernàndez, G., Fiebach, C. J., Galatzer-Levy, I., Geuze, E., Groppa, S., Helmreich, I., Hendler, T., Hermans, E. J., Jovanovic, T., Kubiak, T., Lieb, K., Lutz, B., … Kleim, B. (2017). The resilience framework as a strategy to combat stress-related disorders. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(11), Article 11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0200-8
Norbury A., Seeley S. H., Perez-Rodriguez M. M., & Feder A. (2023). Functional neuroimaging of resilience to trauma: Convergent evidence and challenges for future research. Psychological Medicine, 53(8), 3293–3305. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291723001162
Sahib, A., Chen, J., Cárdenas, D., & Calear, A. L. (2023). Intolerance of uncertainty and emotion regulation: A meta-analytic and systematic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 101, 102270. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2023.102270