Neural signatures of shared subjective affective engagement and disengagement during movie viewing

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.