🎉 Excited to share our publication in PNAS! 🎉
What happens when our stream of consciousness turns towards the body? Our fMRI study of 536 individuals finds that 'body-wandering' is associated with patterns of brain connectivity, physiology, affect, and mental health:
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

🧠 Resting-state fMRI is often treated as the gold standard for studying the brain’s intrinsic organization.

But is it actually the best way to estimate functional architecture?

We tested this directly.

🧵1/8

...If you're open to manual annotations, Emo-Codes can help for a variety of features (emocodes.org/about/) and we review some techniques here (subsection "Capturing subjective experiences during movies" of doi.org/10.1093/cerc...). Happy to have a more in-depth chat over email/call! 3/3

...if there's continuous spoken language, you could use NLP (doi.org/10.3758/s134...). Emotion I would recommend using manual annotations, though automated algorithms exist (doi.org/10.1109/FG47... )... 2/3

Hard to answer properly in Bluesky limits, but: low level features are the easiest and you can use something like Pliers in Python. Py-Feat can also be used for faces.
Tools for semantic content and emotion will depend heavily on the nature of the clip (e.g., language, faces, live/animated)... 1/3

Thank you! 😊

Thank you!!! 😊

Individual differences in neural event segmentation of continuous experiences Abstract. Event segmentation is a spontaneous part of perception, important for processing continuous information and organizing it into memory. Although n

Huge shout-out to co-authors (incl. @purnimaqamar.bsky.social), very much a team effort. Big thanks to @csavasegal.bsky.social @esfinn.bsky.social and colleagues, whose prior work (i.e., doi.org/10.1093/cerc...) inspired this study.

Our analyses revealed tripartite associations between anxiety symptoms, participants descriptions of the movie, and brain activity in insula, default mode, and dorsal attention regions. These findings underscore the utility of movie paradigms in research on subjective emotional experiences. 2/2

Patients with and without anxiety watched an anxiety-inducing movie during fMRI. Afterward, they provided open descriptions of the movies. Their responses underwent natural language processing to quantity semantic content. 1/2

Linking subjective experience of anxiety to brain function using natural language processing Abstract. Research on anxiety focuses on clinically relevant behaviours and neurophysiological responses, particularly emphasizing recruitment of amygdala,

Our latest work on the neurobiology of subjective emotional experience in anxiety is out now in SCAN 🧠 Brief summary below 👇 doi.org/10.1093/scan...

Excited to share our new paper in
Scientific Reports. Pre-scanning state anxiety was associated with reduced rs-FC in the DMN in a trait-anxious community sample, underscoring how children’s MRI scanning experiences may be associated with rs-FC. Grateful for mentorship from @UCRiverside and @NIH.

Children’s state anxiety before MRI scanning and resting state functional connectivity in large scale brain networks - Scientific Reports Introduction Most resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) research does not consider the participant’s subjective state during magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Heightened anxiety before an MRI ...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Considering brain state for individualized functional connectivity-based rTMS Abstract. Recent endeavors to optimize the efficacy of repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) treatment have focused on locating individualized stimulation targets using functional connec...

Controversial? Classic?
What if rest is not best? 🤔
Congrats to @halleeshearer.bsky.social for this thoughtful commentary, and thanks to @ninetlab.bsky.social for the 🎬 movie x rTMS 🧲 collaboration. doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Want to learn about FMRI visualization, processing and group analysis? Join us for the next AFNI Bootcamp (Jan. 27-29, 2026) for a fun few days of theory and interactive practicals.

Details+registration for this virtual course:
afni.nimh.nih.gov/bootcamp

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

Outside my expertise, but I'm interested to know the SNR of the CMR02 measurement. Looks highly variable, even more so than BOLD.

Assessing Behavioral Threat Avoidance in Pediatric Anxiety With Naturalistic Games Behavioral avoidance exacerbates anxiety symptoms. Capturing and identifying maladaptive avoidance patterns holds clinical utility. However, effective assessment tools which provide unique informatio...

Our latest study led by @purnimaqamar.bsky.social on avoidance in pediatric anxiety is out now in Mental Health Science 🎉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

** Recruiting a postdoc ** We are looking for a postdoc to work on emotion, mental health, and interoception, based in London at @ucl.ac.uk in my lab (Clinical and Affective Neuroscience). Part of a large Wellcome Grant (co-led with the brilliant @camillanord.bsky.social)

Excited to share our manuscript about BrainEffeX, a tool for exploring fMRI effect sizes. Includes why we made it, how to use it + contribute, and how we made it.

@sneuroble.bsky.social @psychonetrics.bsky.social
@alexkfischbach.bsky.social
@nichols.bsky.social
@dscheinost.bsky.social & MINDS Lab

Autonomic physiological coupling of the global fMRI signal - Nature Neuroscience The brain and body are necessarily connected. Here the authors show that brain blood flow and electrical activity are coupled with systemic physiological changes in the body.

This may be relevant? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Data only shows associations. Turning those into claims about mechanism or causation? That requires a Rosetta Stone of prior knowledge + theory. Resting-state fMRI is purely observational; correlation is its currency. From this, plenty of "theoretical toys" about brain function can be built...

This is amazing work Sarah, super interesting!

Predictive Modelling of Depression Treatment Response using Individual Symptoms and Latent Factors Machine learning models have increasingly been used to identify predictors of treatment response in depression, and it is hoped that they may eventually help with clinical decision making. However, th...

Excited to share this new preprint on the Predictive Modelling of Depression Treatment Response using Individual Symptoms and Latent Factors with @clairegillan.bsky.social fresh up on @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Agreed! I'm often excited about cool, emerging fMRI methods which promise a lot. I've preregistered their use with high hopes and things fall flat. Post-hoc, the old methods turn out more sensitive. Obviously there are lots of factors, but it's made me quite hesitant without repeated validation.

Altered basal forebrain regulation of intrinsic brain networks in depressive and anxiety disorders - Nature Mental Health Using 7T resting-state functional MRI data, the authors investigate the effective connectivity of basal forebrain areas in a transdiagnostic sample of patients with anxiety and depression and healthy ...

Our latest work is now out in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! We examined the role of the basal forebrain and its influence on intrinsic brain networks in depressive and anxiety disorders.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

@psychunimelb.bsky.social, @mbciu.bsky.social, #UnimelbMDHS

The @cahbir.bsky.social and @rutgersbhi.bsky.social are hiring! Multiple open area and open rank faculty jobs, wonderful colleagues, amazing resources, and one of the largest communities of brain science research groups on the planet. Please apply and share widely.

jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/209...

Launched in 2023, Imaging Neuroscience is now firmly established, with full indexing (PubMed, etc.) and 700 papers to date.

We're very happy to announce that we are able to reduce the APC to $1400.

Huge thanks to all authors, reviewers, editorial team+board, and MIT Press.

We had two preprints approved in August (these were submitted in May & July). However, since approval, the web pages are no longer available (e.g., osf.io/byu7f_v1). Is this expected?

The entire brain, more or less, is at work: ‘Language regions’ are artefacts of averaging Models of the neurobiology of language suggest that a small number of anatomically fixed brain regions are responsible for language functioning. This derives from centuries of aphasia studies and deca...

Kind of relevant www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...