Title: Tracking human everyday affective experiences from brain dynamics
Jin Ke, research specialist in the Rosenberg Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago
Abstract: From the excitement of reuniting with a long-lost friend to the anger of being treated unfairly, our daily lives are colored by a diverse range of affective experiences. How does the human brain give rise to the richness of these experiences in naturalistic contexts? In this talk, I will present two fMRI projects that address this question using data collected as people watch movies and rest quietly. I will first demonstrate that dynamic functional connectivity tracks moment-to-moment fluctuations in affective experience as participants watch different movies. Results reveal that these brain network dynamics encode generalizable representations of emotional arousal, but not valence. I will next show evidence that functional connectivity observed in the absence of any explicit task encodes aspects of ongoing affective and cognitive states. In particular, functional connectivity patterns measured during rest predict the dimensions, topics, and linguistic sentiment of spontaneous thoughts during mind-wandering. Taken together, these results suggest that we can track everyday naturalistic affective experiences from brain dynamics using a combination of behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and language modeling.