Dynamic functional connectivity and individual differences in emotions during social stress

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychophysiology

Background:

• Acute stress triggers diverse emotional responses with unique temporal patterns.
• Dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) quantifies temporal variations in brain network synchrony, reflecting individual neurodynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between dFC and individual differences in emotional responses to acute psychosocial stress.
• To identify specific brain networks associated with positive and negative emotions during stress.

Main Methods:

• fMRI scanning during a social evaluative threat (SET) task in 16 healthy adult women.
• Post-task questionnaires assessing subjective positive and negative emotions related to stress and relief.
• Parallel factor analysis (PARAFAC) to decompose group dFC into 10 components representing distinct network dynamics and individual differences.

Main Results:

• Two distinct brain networks, identified through dFC component loadings, correlated with stress-related emotions.
• These emotion-related networks involved key regions such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, anterior insula, and amygdala.
• The temporal signatures of the identified positive and negative emotion networks were uncorrelated.

Conclusions:

• Individual differences in stress-induced positive and negative emotions are uniquely associated with specific large-scale brain networks.
• Dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) serves as a potential mechanism underlying individual variability in the emotional components of the stress response.