Resilience-driven neural synchrony during naturalistic movie watching

Abstract

Sharing others' emotional states may facilitate the understanding of their well-being characteristics, such as resilience. Here, we showed that a variety of brain networks in participants who viewed emotional movies are synchronized among those with higher resilience scores. Brain activity was measured in healthy young adults while they naturally watched two movies, one with negative and one with neutral emotional valence, in the 7T MRI scanner. Inter-subject correlation and inter-subject representational similarity analyses were used to investigate the association between resilience and brain-to-brain synchrony while watching movies. The modulation effect of intolerance of uncertainty (IU), a personality trait that shapes biased perception and cognition, on the association between resilience and neural synchrony, was also explored. Resilience-driven neural synchrony was found in a wider set of brain regions including the default mode network, control network, and dorsal attentional network, in response to the negative movie compared to the neutral movie. High-resilience individuals had similar neural activities to their peers, while low-resilience individuals showed more variable neural activities. Additionally, IU modulated resilience-driven neural synchrony differently depending on the emotional stimuli. We propose that similar neural responses in resilient individuals signify their aligned adaptive emotion processing, which facilitates social understanding and connections among them. Conversely, the variability in neural responses indicates vulnerability to adverse psychological outcomes, potentially associated with maladaptive emotional responses and regulation. These findings provide insights into the mechanisms of resilience - by maintaining similar selective attention, inhibitory control, and social cognitive functioning, to ultimately foster a shared understanding of negative events.