Emotional experiences are never static but continuously evolve in response to internal and external contexts. Little is known about how neural patterns change as a function of these experiences, particularly in response to complex, real-world stimuli. This study aimed to identify generalizable neural patterns as individuals collectively engage and disengage from emotions dynamically. To do so, we analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging along with subjective emotional annotations from two independent studies as individuals watched negative and neutral movie clips. We used predictive modeling to test if a model trained to predict a group emotional signature response in one study generalizes to the other study and vice versa. Disengagement patterns generalized specifically across intense clips. They were supported by connections within and between the sensorimotor and salience networks, maybe reflecting the processing of feeling states as individuals regulate their emotions. Prediction success for the engagement signature was mixed, but primarily linked to connections within the visual and between the visual and dorsal attention networks, maybe supporting visual attention orienting as emotions intensify. This work offers potential pathways for identifying generalizable neural patterns contributing to future affective research and clinical applications aiming to better understand dynamic emotional responses to naturalistic stimuli.

Individuals with lifelong face recognition impairment, developmental prosopagnosia (DP), provide a unique testbed for understanding the neural mechanisms of face recognition. Although the right occipital face area (OFA) and right fusiform face area (FFA) are critical for face processing, studies examining their functionality in DP have been inconclusive. Two barriers that have prevented the development of a neural theory of DP are behavioural heterogeneity and limited sample sizes. Using one of the largest samples of DPs collected to examine OFA/FFA function, we tested whether face selectivity in the OFA and FFA relates to individual differences in perceptual impairment in 34 DPs. Face perception, measured using two face matching tasks, was significantly correlated with face selectivity in the right OFA and FFA in DPs. Then, using feature-specific tasks to measure perception of the eye and mouth regions separately, right OFA selectivity was found to be specific to perception of the eye region. The results are the first to connect the right OFA to eye perception deficits in DP, and one of the few studies to demonstrate the neural underpinnings of DP behavioural heterogeneity. More broadly, these findings support the view that the right OFA is specialized for extracting visual information from the eye region.

Background Although trauma-focused psychotherapy remains the first-line treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 14% to 35% of individuals with PTSD fail to achieve symptom remission. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has shown promise as an adjunctive intervention, but its efficacy for PTSD remains inconsistent and may be better informed by the incorporation of brain-based signals to guide stimulation. To address this, we developed a connectivity-based modeling framework to identify functional networks that predict symptom severity and to estimate where stimulation would most effectively reduce PTSD symptoms. Methods We used clinical, structural, and resting-state functional data from 350 veterans with and without PTSD. Principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to functional connectivity matrices to reduce dimensionality, and resulting component scores were entered into a least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression to identify connections associated with symptom severity. To simulate TMS effects, we generated electric field models for 200 randomly distributed cortical sites per participant and used these distributions to estimate connectivity changes proportional to the modeled fields. The estimated changes were combined with PCA regression weights to predict stimulation-induced symptom changes at each site and were mapped across the cortex to create a whole-brain TMS targeting atlas. Results The model identified 2 broad and opposing patterns. Stimulation expected to increase connectivity in the left prefrontal cortex was predicted to reduce symptoms, whereas stimulation expected to decrease connectivity in bilateral parietal and occipital regions was also predicted to reduce symptoms. Conclusions These findings provide a framework for individualized TMS targeting in PTSD and generate potential therapeutic targets for future clinical trials.

BackgroundResearch has primarily examined between-group differences in athletes’ cognition, and particularly sustained attention. More nuanced approaches are needed to better characterize athletes’ attentional abilities.ObjectiveTo examine associations between sport type and traditional Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) indices, and to apply a novel method to characterize within-person fluctuations in sustained attention performance.MethodsParticipants were 198 elite athletes from a regional sport training and development organization in Toronto, Canada (Mage = 17.67 years, SD = 4.58; 56.57% female). Linear regressions explored associations between sport type (team, speed-strength, precision-skill) and SART indices (speed, accuracy, variability), controlling for age and sex. The variance time course procedure was then used to examine intraindividual fluctuations in sustained attention and to explore whether different patterns of performance emerge across sport types.ResultsUsing a pre-established sport classification system, team sport athletes were significantly more accurate on the SART than speed-strength (B = −0.81, p = .002) and precision-skill (B = −0.45, p = .016) athletes; however, the groups did not differ in speed or variability. The variance time course procedure showed that athletes fluctuated between ‘in the zone’ and ‘out of the zone’ attentional states, with ‘out of the zone’ performance marked by greater variability and more error-prone responding. We also provide preliminary evidence that patterns of performance variability differ across sport types.ConclusionDifferent sports may place distinct demands on specific dimensions of attentional performance. Within-person approaches are warranted to advance the field toward more precise assessment of athletes’ cognitive functioning.

OBJECTIVE:Negative metacognitive bias, underestimating one's abilities, is consistently linked to psychopathology, yet prior work has often collapsed anxiety/stress and depression or examined depression alone. We tested the unique associations of depression, anxiety/stress, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with metacognitive bias in post-9/11 veterans. METHODS:Veterans from the Translational Research Center for TBI and Stress Disorders (TRACTS, N = 601; 90% male; M age = 34.31) completed 21-item Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (depression, anxiety/stress), CAPS-IV (PTSD), WHODAS-II Understanding/Communicating (self-reported cognition), and an objective cognition composite (assessment of executive function, memory, and attention). Bias was computed as self-report minus objective cognition. A subsample (n = 239) repeated testing ∼2 years later. RESULTS:At time 1, more negative metacognitive bias was associated with greater anxiety/stress (r = -.41), depressive (r = -.37), and PTSD symptoms (r = -.31) (all ps < .001). In a simultaneous model, anxiety/stress (β = -.29 p < .001) and depressive symptoms (β = -.12, p = .045) explained unique variance though PTSD symptoms did not (β = -.03, p = .524). Longitudinally, changes in bias were uniquely predicted by symptom changes in anxiety/stress (β = -.33, p < .001) and PTSD (β = -.16, p = .001), but not depression (β = -.10, p = .137). CONCLUSIONS:Across cross-sectional and longitudinal models, anxiety/stress emerged as the most consistent correlate of metacognitive bias, with weaker contributions from depression and PTSD. These findings highlight the importance of assessing the self-report versus objective cognition gap and the need to further understand the temporal relationship between anxiety/stress and metacognitive bias.

Background: In the United States, the prevalence of Alzheimer disease (AD) is projected to double over the next 30 years, with associated familial and societal costs estimated at US $1 trillion annually if current trends continue. Although pharmacological treatments of AD are showing promise, the adoption of healthy lifestyle behaviors, particularly during the preclinical phase of AD, may reduce dementia rates by up to 45%. Subjective cognitive decline (SCD), defined as persistent self-perceived declines in cognitive functioning compared with previously normal cognitive abilities, has been identified as a potential preclinical stage of AD. Objective: This randomized controlled trial aims to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of an internet-based, asynchronous mindfulness-based stress reduction program compared with an active control group (an internet-based lifestyle education program). Secondary objectives include examining preliminary effects of each intervention on SCD, plasma-based biomarkers of amyloid and tau pathology, and everyday mind-wandering. Methods: Sixty adults aged 50 years and older will be screened for SCD in the absence of objective cognitive impairment, based on the Uniform Data Set Neuropsychological Battery (version 3.0) from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center. Eligible and consenting participants will complete behavioral and imaging-based tasks of sustained attention and mind-wandering, as well as blood draws at baseline and after the 8-week intervention. After baseline assessments, participants will be randomized to either an internet-based, asynchronous mindfulness-based stress reduction program or the internet-based lifestyle education program. Both programs have been adapted from our manualized in-person programs and refined through focus group interviews with the target population. Results: The study was funded in April 2024. Phase 1 focused on iterative development of the 2 programs based on focus group feedback. Recruitment for the randomized controlled trial (internet-based mind-body training trial) began in June 2025 and is ongoing. Recruitment is expected to conclude in September 2026, with data collection ending in December 2026. Conclusions: Behavioral, lifestyle-based interventions that emphasize experiential practices show promise as preventative strategies to prevent decline in cognitive and brain health. Yet, there remain significant barriers to engaging with in-person programs, including limited accessibility, time and schedule constraints, and travel logistics. The internet-based mind-body training trial will evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of 2 fully online, mind-body training programs for adults at risk for AD. Future Stage II and Stage III studies will be necessary to establish the efficacy of these programs for improving AD biomarkers and cognitive outcomes and their broader dissemination to adults noticing subtle changes in cognitive functioning.

Movies evoke dynamic emotional experiences that fluctuate moment-to-moment. While fMRI has mapped these fluctuations, the real-time continuous oscillatory dynamics underlying naturalistic viewing remain less understood. In this study, 25 adults watched an emotionally rich short film while EEG, continuous subjective arousal annotations and pupil diameter were recorded. Inter-subject correlation (ISC) analyses revealed robust synchronization in behavioural and pupillary arousal across the cohort. Leveraging these shared, group-level arousal trajectories to probe individual-level cortical processing, we mapped the neural networks correlating with these two arousal signals. Both pupillary and subjective arousal negatively correlated with low-frequency power in occipitoparietal regions, reflecting bottom-up sensory gain control and attentional gating. Furthermore, high-arousal epochs were marked by low-frequency desynchronization in the precuneus; this cortical activation likely indexes the rapid retrieval of episodic memories required to update the viewer's situational model during plot shifts. Finally, while both measures tracked low-frequency acoustic features in the auditory cortex, subjective arousal was more prominently associated with extended top-down semantic networks and central theta activity. These findings highlight that while pupillary arousal heavily reflects bottom-up sensory intensity, subjective reporting captures active cognitive integration. Together, this demonstrates how emotional arousal acts as a dynamic control signal, orchestrating a complex interplay of sensory gating, memory updating and top-down evaluation to make sense of the unfolding narrative.

OBJECTIVE:To determine if remote military mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is uniquely associated with deficits in global metacognition, independent of psychopathology. SETTING:Translational Research Center for TBI and Stress Disorders, VA Boston Healthcare System. PARTICIPANTS:A total of 567 community-dwelling post-9/11 veterans (mean age = 34): 182 veterans with no mTBI, 134 with at least one nonmilitary mTBI, and 251 with at least one military mTBI. Exclusion criteria were severe neurologic, psychiatric, or cognitive impairment; moderate/severe TBI; or effort-measure failure. DESIGN:Cross-sectional examining predictors of global metacognition of cognitive abilities. MAIN MEASURES:Global metacognitive bias, calculated as self-reported cognition (WHODAS-II Understanding/Communicating) minus objective cognitive performance (attention, memory, executive composite). Secondary measures included self-reported and objective cognition and global metacognitive sensitivity (correlation between self-reported and objective cognition). RESULTS:Self-reported cognition scores for veterans with remote military mTBI were significantly lower than their objective cognition scores, resulting in significantly more negative metacognitive bias (M = -0.27, SD = 1.05) than those with a nonmilitary mTBI (M = 0.24, SD = 0.84) or no mTBI (M = 0.33, SD = 0.99). Notably, this effect remained significant after accounting for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety/stress. It was not explained by blast exposure, peritraumatic context, or time since last mTBI, although it was modestly related to lifetime mTBI count. CONCLUSION:Military mTBI is associated with more negative metacognitive bias independent of psychiatric conditions. Such bias may impede recovery and treatment effectiveness, suggesting that metacognitive interventions could be a valuable component of mild TBI care.

Smartphones enable people to access the online world from anywhere at any time. Despite the benefits of this technology, there is growing concern that smartphone use could adversely impact cognitive functioning and mental health. Correlational and anecdotal evidence suggests that these concerns may be well-founded, but causal evidence remains scarce. We conducted a month-long randomized controlled trial to investigate how removing constant access to the internet through smartphones might impact psychological functioning. We used a mobile phone application to block all mobile internet access from participants' smartphones for 2 weeks and objectively track compliance. This intervention specifically targeted the feature that makes smartphones "smart" (mobile internet) while allowing participants to maintain mobile connection (through texts and calls) and nonmobile access to the internet (e.g. through desktop computers). The intervention improved mental health, subjective well-being, and objectively measured ability to sustain attention; 91% of participants improved on at least one of these outcomes. Mediation analyses suggest that these improvements can be partially explained by the intervention's impact on how people spent their time; when people did not have access to mobile internet, they spent more time socializing in person, exercising, and being in nature. These results provide causal evidence that blocking mobile internet can improve important psychological outcomes, and suggest that maintaining the status quo of constant connection to the internet may be detrimental to time use, cognitive functioning, and well-being.

Affective facial expressions elicit approach-avoidance motivational responses that shape social behavior. Qualitatively, individuals report frequently experiencing competing motivations to approach and avoid other individuals in social contexts (i.e. social approach-avoidance conflict; AAC). Moreover, theoretical frameworks propose that successful navigation of social AAC plays a critical role in adaptive social behavior. However, despite an extensive array of well-validated, non-social AAC paradigms, no research has developed a paradigm that experimentally elicits and reliably quantifies social AAC in humans. To address this issue, we developed and validated a novel social AAC (SAAC) paradigm with an independent replication across two samples. In the SAAC paradigm, morphed facial expressions are used to parametrically modulate the intensity of social reward (happiness), social threat (anger), or social reward-threat conflict (co-occurring happiness and anger). Demonstrating robust AAC effects, social reward-threat conflict uniquely elicited more intermediate approach-avoidance choice selection and slower reaction times compared to social reward and social threat. Furthermore, computational drift diffusion models demonstrated that social AAC was driven by noisier evidence accumulation processes. Together, these findings demonstrated and replicated that our novel SAAC paradigm reliably elicits social AAC, which may provide a more mechanistic understanding of social behavior and its dysregulation in psychopathology.

This study examines the impact of emotional distraction on sustained attention using a novel gradual onset continuous performance task (gradCPT). Sustained attention is a foundational cognitive process, vulnerable to both internal (endogenous) and external (exogenous) disruptions. Reliable, validated paradigms to assess internal sources of variation in sustained attention have been used to characterize basic aspects of attention as well as individual differences and neurobiological mechanisms. However, sustained attention can also be disrupted by external distraction, especially highly salient distractors, due to their affective and/or arousing nature. Markedly less work has been conducted to develop reliable and validated paradigms to study these effects on sustained attention. This study introduces a novel task, the emogradCPT, to characterize the impact of emotional distractors (background images) on the ability to sustain attention during an emotionally neutral task (digit discrimination task). Across two experiments and three rounds of data collection, we demonstrate that emotionally negative distractors robustly and reliably disrupt ongoing ability to sustain attention, reflected in reduced accuracy, and slower RTs, relative to neutral, positive, and no distractor conditions. Further, we validated the task by correlating objective and subjective measures of distraction, as well as demonstrating the impact of these distractors on downstream memory encoding and affect. Making these data and tools publicly available, we encourage the use of this paradigm to inform future basic, clinical, and neuroimaging studies of affective interactions with ongoing goal-directed attentional processes.

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) provides a unique opportunity for identifying neural mechanisms that are necessary for normal face recognition, yet the neural basis of DP remains unresolved. We conducted an extensive fMRI investigation of the functional activation and connectivity of ventral and lateral face-selective regions in DP and expanded the analysis to include connections between this face-selective network and all other cortical regions. From a large sample of DPs (N = 34) and controls (N = 23), we found neural differences in DPs in both modalities that implicated the left fusiform face area (FFA). During passive viewing of faces, face-selective activation was reduced in the left FFA and left occipital face area (OFA). During rest, overall functional connectivity within the face network was reduced in DPs, with the largest reductions involving the right anterior superior sulcus (aSTS). Within the face network, DPs showed the greatest reduction in functional connectivity between the right aSTS and the left FFA. However, we found no evidence for functional connectivity differences beyond the areas surrounding the face-selective regions, indicating that functional connectivity deficits in DP are mostly confined to the face network. Overall, these results emphasize the role of the left FFA in face recognition deficits, both in local activation and in its connectivity within the face network.

Metabolic syndrome is a collection of health factors that increases risk for cardiovascular disease. A condition of aging, metabolic syndrome is associated with reduced brain network integrity, including functional connectivity alterations among the default mode, regions vulnerable to neurodegeneration. Prevalence of metabolic syndrome is elevated in younger populations including post-9/11 Veterans and individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder, but it is unclear whether metabolic syndrome affects brain function in earlier adulthood. Identifying early effects of metabolic syndrome on brain network integrity is critical, as these impacts could contribute to increased risk for cognitive disorders later in life for Veterans. The current study examined whether metabolic syndrome and its individual components were associated with default mode functional connectivity. We also explored the contribution of posttraumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury on these metabolic syndrome-brain relationships. Post-9/11 Veterans with combat deployment history (95 with and 325 without metabolic syndrome) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging to capture seed-based resting-state functional connectivity within the default mode. The metabolic syndrome group demonstrated reduced positive functional connectivity between the posterior cingulate cortex seed and the bilateral superior frontal gyrus. Data-driven analyses demonstrated that metabolic syndrome components, particularly cholesterol and central adiposity, were associated with widespread reductions in default mode network connectivity. Functional connectivity was also reduced in participants with metabolic syndrome but without current posttraumatic stress disorder diagnosis and with traumatic brain injury history. These results suggest that metabolic syndrome disrupts resting-state functional connectivity decades earlier than prior work has shown.

When watching a negative emotional movie, we differ from person to person in the ease with which we engage and the difficulty with which we disengage throughout a temporally evolving narrative. We investigated neural responses of emotional processing, by considering inter-individual synchronization in subjective emotional engagement and disengagement. The neural underpinnings of these shared responses are ideally studied in naturalistic scenarios like movie viewing, wherein individuals emotionally engage and disengage at their own time and pace throughout the course of a narrative. Despite the rich data that naturalistic designs can bring to the study, there is a challenge in determining time-resolved behavioral markers of subjective engagement and disengagement and their underlying neural responses. We used a within-subject cross-over design instructing 22 subjects to watch clips of either neutral or sad content while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants watched the same movies a second time while continuously annotating the perceived emotional intensity, thus enabling the mapping of brain activity and emotional experience. Our analyses revealed that between-participant similarity in waxing (engagement) and waning (disengagement) of emotional intensity was directly related to the between-participant similarity in spatiotemporal patterns of brain activation during the movie(s). Similar patterns of engagement reflected common activation in the bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex, regions often involved in self-referenced evaluation and generation of negative emotions. Similar patterns of disengagement reflected common activation in central executive and default mode network regions often involved in top-down emotion regulation. Together this work helps to better understand cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning engagement and disengagement from emotionally evocative narratives.

Metacognition, thinking about thinking, is disrupted in several clinical populations. One aspect of metacognition, global metacognitive bias (difference between objective and self-reported abilities), has shown to be particularly relevant to clinical functioning. However, previous studies of global metacognitive biases in clinical populations have not measured objective and self-reported abilities relative to normative samples, making quantification of the severity of biases difficult. Additionally, few studies have examined whether cognitive interventions can improve metacognitive biases and none have examined how this relates to depressive/PTSD symptoms. In 84 participants with mild traumatic brain injury (77% Veterans), a population whose self-reported cognitive deficits are often worse than their objective deficits, we assessed PTSD/depressive symptoms and self-reported and objective measures of global cognition. We used age-adjusted norm-based z-scores for cognition measures and calculated bias by subtracting objective from self-report scores. Participants then received 13 weeks of either targeted cognitive training or entertainment games training, with both conditions providing performance feedback. Participants were measured at baseline, immediately post-training, and 3 months post-training. We found large negative metacognitive biases in those with depression (z-score difference=-1.77), PTSD (-1.47), and depression+PTSD (-2.29). Notably, metacognitive bias improved after both targeted and entertainment training and was strongly associated with depressive and PTSD symptom improvements (r=.-41/-.42, respectively). These effects endured after 3-months of no contact. These findings show that depression/PTSD are associated with substantial negative global metacognition biases and provide initial evidence that cognitive training can improve biases and depressive/PTSD symptoms.