ArticleScience advances2021
Endogenous variation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex state dynamics during naturalistic viewing reflects affective experience.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 90 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
90 citing papers in PubMed.
- Oxytocin Reduces Subjective Fear in Naturalistic Social Contexts via Enhancing Top-Down Middle Cingulate Amygdala Regulation and Brain-Wide Fear Representations.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Trial
- Effects of a dissociative drug on fronto-limbic resting-state functional connectivity in individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder: a randomized controlled pilot study.Psychopharmacology · 2024Trial
- Youth Autistic Traits and Brain Activation States During Socioemotional Processing.The American journal of psychiatry · 2026Article
- A neural signature of sleep deprivation in the human brain.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The inadequacy of normative ratings for building stimulus sets in affective science.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Identification of Cortices with Characteristics of Rhythmic Entrainment and Its Periodicity.Experimental neurobiology · 2026Article
- The Cognitive-Affective Social Processing and Emotion Regulation (CASPER) model.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Efficiency Recalibrates Social-Emotional Trade-Offs Behind Partner Choice in Direct Reciprocity through Intention-Specific Neural Bases.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Structured Neural Variability from Repeated Naturalistic Video Watching Experiences.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Group membership and stereotype content jointly affect neural processing during resource allocation decisions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Awe is characterized as an ambivalent affect in the human behavior and cortex.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- A neurofunctional signature of affective arousal generalizes across valence domains and distinguishes subjective experience from autonomic reactivity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Neural signatures of emotional intent and inference align during social consensus.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Understanding human brain function in real-world environments.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Aberrant neural event segmentation during a continuous social narrative in trauma-exposed older adolescents and young adults.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Predicting whole-brain neural dynamics from prefrontal cortex functional near-infrared spectroscopy signal during movie-watching.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Lights, Camera, Emotion: REELMO's 1060 Hours of Affective Reports to Explore Emotions in Naturalistic Contexts.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Cortical representational geometry of diverse tasks reveals subject-specific and subject-invariant cognitive structures.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Worry and rumination elicit similar neural representations: neuroimaging evidence for repetitive negative thinking.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
30 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
How we process ongoing experiences is shaped by our personal history, current needs, and future goals. Consequently, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity involved in processing these subjective appraisals appears to be highly idiosyncratic across individuals. To elucidate the role of the vmPFC in processing our ongoing experiences, we developed a computational framework and analysis pipeline to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of individual vmPFC responses as participants viewed a 45-minute television drama. Through a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging, facial expression tracking, and self-reported emotional experiences across four studies, our data suggest that the vmPFC slowly transitions through a series of discretized states that broadly map onto affective experiences. Although these transitions typically occur at idiosyncratic times across people, participants exhibited a marked increase in state alignment during high affectively valenced events in the show. Our work suggests that the vmPFC ascribes affective meaning to our ongoing experiences.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.