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Investigating meaningful experiences using fMRI and a personalized movie paradigm

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Douglas Forrest¹ (douglas.forrest@ubc.ca), Andre Zamani¹, Desmond Wood-Anderson¹, Tamara Vanderwal¹, Kalina Christoff¹; ¹University of British Columbia

We are all motivated to seek meaning, prioritizing events and experiences that provide purpose, significance, and coherence within the broader context of our lives. Meaning is pervasive, though its precise phenomenological and neuroscientific elements remain unclear; partly due to the field’s lack of a meaning-eliciting paradigm. In this study, we investigated the neuroscience of meaningful experiences elicited by standardized (‘The Present’ and ‘Forrest Gump’) and self-selected movies in a novel fMRI paradigm. First, movie clips were personalized by having each participate annotate moments that felt meaningful (in terms of an experience of connection or resonance) and events that they thought were meaningful (in terms of their purpose, importance or relationship to the overall story). We also measured the degree to which participants found events engaging and self-relevant. Second, participants engaged in uninterrupted viewing of the annotated movie clips during fMRI scanning. Behavioral analyses evaluated the relationship between meaning ratings and movie content (e.g., presence of faces or music), as well as between-subject differences in meaning ratings in response to standardized films. fMRI analyses with general linear modelling evaluated the unique neural activation associated with moments that felt meaningful and events that were thought to be meaningful to the overall story. Results from this study advance our understanding of the neural correlates of meaning and highlight the unique experiential and neural responses that participants report when engaging with film.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions