TY - JOUR T1 - Intersubject brain network organization during dynamic anxious anticipation JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/120451 SP - 120451 AU - Mahshid Najafi AU - Joshua Kinnison AU - Luiz Pessoa Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/24/120451.abstract N2 - How do large-scale brain networks reorganize during the waxing and waning of anxious anticipation? Here, threat was dynamically modulated during functional MRI as two circles slowly meandered on the screen; if they touched, an unpleasant shock was delivered. We developed a novel intersubject network analysis method, which allows the investigation of network-level properties “across brains,” and sought to determine how network properties changed during periods of approach (circles moving closer) and periods of retreat (circles moving apart). Dynamic threat altered network cohesion across the salience, executive, and task-negative networks, as well as subcortical regions. Functional connections between subcortical regions and the salience network also increased during approach vs. retreat, including the putative periaqueductal gray, habenula, and amygdala, showing that the latter is involved under conditions of relatively prolonged and uncertain threat (the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis was observed during both approach and retreat). Together, our findings unraveled dynamic properties of large-scale networks across participants while threat levels varied continuously, and demonstrate the potential of characterizing emotional processing at the level of distributed networks. ER -