Context matters: Anterior and posterior cortical midline responses to sad movie scenes

Narrative movies can create powerful emotional responses. While recent research has advanced the understanding of neural networks involved in immersive movie viewing, their modulation within a movie's dynamic context remains inconclusive. In this study, 24 healthy participants passively watched sad scene climaxes taken from 24 romantic comedies, while brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance (fMRI). To study effects of context, the sad scene climaxes were presented with either coherent scene context, replaced non-coherent context or without context. In a second viewing, the same clips were rated continuously for sadness. The ratings varied over time with peaks of experienced sadness within the assumed climax intervals. Activations in anterior and posterior cortical midline regions increased if presented with both coherent and replaced context, while activation in the temporal gyri decreased. This difference was more pronounced for the coherent context condition. Psycho-Physiological interactions (PPI) analyses showed a context-dependent coupling of midline regions with occipital visual and sub-cortical reward regions. Our results demonstrate the pivotal role of midline structures and their interaction with perceptual and reward areas in processing contextually embedded socio-emotional information in movies.