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Neural state shifts in response to changing affective context

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Rohini Kumar¹ (rohini.kumar@emory.edu), Tejas Savalia¹, Alexandra Cohen¹; ¹Emory University

Affect may impose structure on ongoing experience. Recent behavioral studies have found that changes in affect influence the organization of events in memory and align with reported event boundaries. Neural representations of affect are distributed throughout the brain including in subcortical brain areas and in the cortical hierarchy of regions implicated in processing continuous experience. How dynamic changes in affect influence the neural parsing of experience remains unclear. We hypothesize that neural states reflect affect such that there are slower changes in neural state in stable as compared to highly variable affective contexts. We applied a Hidden Markov Model-based neural segmentation algorithm to identify shifts in multivariate activation patterns in fMRI movie-watching data from the Emo-FilM database (n=28). We used continuous affect ratings of the film stimuli to identify films high and low in affective surprise. Preliminary analyses indicate that the rate of neural state shifts in the angular gyrus and middle occipital lobe was significantly lower for films with more stable compared to more variable affective surprise. Unexpectedly, the rate of shifts was higher for films with more stable compared to more variable affective surprise in the amygdala and hippocampus (Wilcoxon rank-sum tests: ps <.001). These preliminary findings suggest that affective context may shape the dynamics of neural states at different timescales in different regions. Future work will assess the degree of alignment between affective surprise and neural state transitions across the cortical hierarchy and in subcortical emotion-related brain regions.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions