Abstract
Emotional reactivity and regulation are essential for mental well-being, as they are critical for managing emotional responses, fostering resilience, and maintaining overall emotional balance. Despite their importance, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms that support these processes, which is needed to develop more effective interventions for emotional dysregulation and related mental health disorders. Previous research has predominantly relied on discrete trials and experimental task manipulations to isolate emotional processes. However, the use of emotional movies offers an ecologically valid method, allowing for the investigation of emotional processing in a context that simulates dynamic real-world experiences. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), during the viewing of neutral and sad movies, along with subsequent real-time emotional annotations of participants’ experiences, we differentiated distinct phases of emotional engagement and disengagement. Functional connectivity across large-scale networks dynamically covaried with the viewer’s engagement and disengagement patterns. A common pattern emerged across films: emotional engagement was primarily associated with connections within the Visual and between the Visual and Dorsal Attention Network. Only for highly emotional movies, emotional engagement was associated with connections between the Visual and Default Mode Network. In contrast, emotional disengagement was associated with connections mostly within the Visual and connections between the Sensorimotor Network and Salience Network.
We then applied predictive modeling to test whether these neural connectivity markers of engagement and disengagement generalized to other independent movie-watching datasets. Our findings revealed that disengagement patterns generalized specifically across intense clips, while engagement patterns generalized across all movie clips, including neutral contexts. Together this work helps to better understand cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning engagement in and disengagement from emotionally evocative narratives, offering potential pathways for identifying generalizable neural patterns that can inform future affective research and clinical applications.
Significance statement How emotions unfold over time has been a subject of significant theoretical debate. In real life, negative emotional reactions often trigger a subsequent phase of regulation aimed at returning to a state of emotional equilibrium. However, the neural processes underlying these phases are rarely studied in their natural temporal progression. Functional MRI experiments using movies offer an opportunity to simulate these real-life scenarios, enabling individuals to empathize with characters and immerse themselves in hypothetical real-life situations. These experiments have revealed that emotional responses to negative movie content, along with the regulation of these responses, lead to significant reorganizations in the brain’s functional architecture. Notably, these reorganizations differ when individuals react emotionally compared to when the emotional experience wanes.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Revised and modified text along the manuscript, several sections on results updated, affiliations updated, supplemental files updated
