Schedule of Events | Search Abstracts | Invited Symposia | Symposia | Poster Sessions | Data Blitz

Fc-MVPA reveals migraine-related differences in connectivity during emotional audiovisual processing

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Keva Klamer¹, Joshua Craig¹, Christina Haines¹, KiAnna Sullivan¹, Shaylyn Kress¹, Jane O'Connor¹, Peter Seres²; ¹University of Lethbridge, ²University of Alberta

Migraine is a neurological disorder characterized by headaches, nausea, mood changes, and fatigue. It alters lower-level visual and auditory processing, leading to hypersensitivities that may amplify audiovisual multisensory integration. Migraine has also been associated with increased sensitivity to emotional arousal and valence, though the relative significance of these factors remains unclear. The present study investigates how migraine influences large-scale network interactions during complex audiovisual processing and how these effects vary as a function of emotional arousal and valence. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data (fMRI) data was collected from 22 migraineurs and 21 healthy controls during the passive viewing of three audiovisual films (negative valence/high arousal; positive valence/high arousal; neutral valence/low arousal. Functional connectivity multivariate pattern analysis (fc-MVPA) identified distributed connectivity patterns that differentiate the groups. During both positive and negative high-arousal conditions, fc-MVPA identified a seed within the default mode network (DMN) that exhibited differential whole-brain functional connectivity between groups. Individuals with migraine demonstrated greater within-DMN connectivity relative to controls. Under negative high-arousal conditions only, additional seeds located in the ventral and dorsal attention networks showed altered whole-brain connectivity, characterized by increased cross-network coupling with the visual network in the migraine group. A further significant seed was also identified within the visual network during this condition. These findings indicate that migraine-related network alterations emerge selectively under emotionally charged contexts in DMN, visual and attention related areas, primarily driven by negative valence rather than arousal. Taken together, these results suggest that migraine is associated with network-level differences during emotional audiovisual processing.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions