Abstract
Emotions signal elements of the environment that we should address, and critically, experiences that we should learn from. Despite considerable efforts and a proliferation of methods for analyzing and interpreting fine-grained patterns of functional brain activity (i.e., neural signatures), the specific neural bases of emotion remain unclear, which renders a vague understanding how subjective emotional experience emerges and influences processing and learning from ongoing experience. Whereas common approaches to this question search for neural signatures of emotion in brief ‘snapshots’ of brain activity (i.e., brain states) following emotional stimuli, we draw from the theory of predictive processing and test whether the magnitude of naturalistic emotion is instead represented in spatiotemporal trajectories between brain states – that is, the way brain activity unfolds over time. The present study uses neural event segmentation to identify meaningful states of neural activity during a naturalistic, unstructured, and highly impactful emotional experience: receiving grades on real-world University exams. 40 participants completed functional brain scans while anticipating and viewing their grades on major Chemistry exams (4 exams per participant; 160 exams total). The proposed analyses will 1) identify the neural regions that encode the onset of emotional events and characterize their temporal dynamics during ongoing emotional experience, 2) investigate whether the brain encodes features of emotional stimuli via neural signatures or spatiotemporal trajectories, and 3) whether neural states underlying highly individualized emotional experiences reoccur over time, potentially reflecting recurrent or generalized emotional contents of one’s experience. These analyses promise to clarify the neural architecture that subserves emotion and shed light on the reciprocal influences between emotion and expectations during learning.