Individual Differences of Cortical and Subcortical Emotion-Informed Functional Gradients

The complex interplay between brain regions that support emotional experience and their link to individual differences is a topic of active research. Additionally, there has been growing interest in using functional gradients to investigate human cortical organization during both rest and film fMRI. Among these, several studies demonstrated improved brain fingerprinting performance, reflecting greater neural identification capability of film fMRI against rest fMRI despite higher subject synchronization during film-watching than in rest. Comparably, in this work we study the relation between individual differences, in particular, state anxiety and openness scores, and brain activity during the processing of emotional scenes in films, through functional gradients. In addition to including subcortical regions, we propose a new exploratory framework for computing functional gradients based on a subset of frames selected using emotional annotation data of films, resulting in emotion-informed functional gradients. Then we evaluate the variance in emotion-informed gradients across subjects and employ these same gradients in the prediction of individual differences. For emotion-informed functional gradients, the highest predictability of state anxiety was found for scenes of negative valence and medium-high arousal, corresponding to the typical location of anxiety within the valence-arousal-power emotional space. Additionally, predictability of state anxiety tended to be negatively correlated to inter-subject variability. In contrast, predictability of openness was found to be highest during scenes with low arousal and positively correlated to inter-subject variability. Although preliminary, these findings suggest that macroscale brain organization is affected by emotional experience, and that frame selection based on the latter could be useful to remove non-subject-specific variability while extracting subject-specific information related to the emotion experience. It also suggests that frame selection increases inter-subject variability allowing the extraction of more subject-specific information. Thus, expanding on the idea of brain fingerprint in film fMRI, our results provide initial evidence that emotional experiences enhance disentanglement of various domains of individual differences. Moreover, depending on the individual difference of interest, fMRI acquired during more or less constrained paradigms would be more suitable to reveal different properties of brain function.