Trait paranoia shapes inter-subject synchrony in brain activity during an ambiguous social narrative

Abstract

15Individuals often interpret the same event in different ways. How do personality traits modulate 16 patterns of brain activity evoked by a complex stimulus? Participants listened to a narrative 17 during functional MRI describing a deliberately ambiguous social scenario, designed such that 18 some individuals would find it highly suspicious, while others less so. Using inter-subject 19 correlation analysis, we identified several brain areas that were differentially synchronized 20 during listening between participants with high-and low trait-level paranoia, including theory-21 of-mind regions. Event-related analysis indicated that while superior temporal cortex responded 22 reliably to mentalizing events in all participants, anterior temporal and medial prefrontal cortex 23 responded to such events only in high-paranoia individuals. Analyzing participants' speech as 24 they freely recalled the narrative revealed semantic and syntactic features that also scaled with 25 paranoia. Results indicate that trait paranoia acts as an intrinsic 'prime', producing different 26 neural and behavioral responses to the same stimulus across individuals.

Relationships between depressive symptoms and brain responses during emotional movie viewing emerge in adolescence

“…One such relationship was identified by Kaufmann and colleagues, who reported that while adolescents with increased overall psychiatric symptom severity exhibited decreased resting-state connectome distinctiveness compared to healthy individuals, no significant relationship between these variables was found in children (23). Although the association between functional brain typicality and symptom severity was negative in our analyses, we note that functional typicality has been shown to scale positively with some clinically relevant features (trait paranoia (59)) and negatively with others (depression (36) and autism (60) symptom severity). Therefore, while functional typicality appears to serve as an index of psychopathology that emerges during adolescence, future work should clarify how these relationships may differ across psychiatric diagnoses and analytic approaches.…”

Neural signatures of attentional engagement during narratives and its consequences for event memory

“…Functional neuroimaging studies have used naturalistic, narrative stimuli to examine how we perceive 11,12 and remember 13 structured events based on memory of contexts, [14][15][16] prior knowledge or beliefs, [17][18][19] and emotional and social reasoning. [20][21][22] However, strikingly few neuroimaging studies have directly probed attention during naturalistic paradigms.…”

Untangling the Relatedness among Correlations, Part III: Inter-Subject Correlation Analysis through Bayesian Multilevel Modeling for Naturalistic Scanning

“…Their corresponding effectsb 1k andb 2k are presumably equal, but in the same vein as the practical implementation of subject-specific effects through two separate random-effects components as previously elaborated, the two fixed-effects components ofb 1k andb 2k that are associated with the explanatory variable x would also have to be estimated separately through data duplication. The situation with more than one explanatory variable would be similar except for an expanded form, and this modeling strategy has been applied at the whole-brain voxel level to a few studies in the literature (e.g., Moraczewski et al, 2018;Finn et al, 2018).…”

“…It has been argued that, under a context closer to natural environment, neural responses are more reproducible and reliable than traditional simple repetitive stimuli (Hasson et al, 2010) due to the involvement of extensive cognitive processing (such as working memory, judgment, reasoning, social cognition, etc.). Its adoption has been steadily growing in investigating various aspects of brain functions such as music imagery (Zhang et al, 2017), early childhood development (Moraczewski et al, 2018), personality traits (Finn et al, 2018) and cognitive differences between schizophrenics and controls. For typical task-related designs, the focus is usually on identifying regions activated by an explicit task or condition.…”