Resilience-driven neural synchrony during naturalistic movie watching

Sharing others’ emotional states may facilitate the understanding of their well-being characteristics, such as resilience. Despite increasing attention given to resilience for its role in maintaining mental health, the intricacies of its underlying neural correlates are still poorly understood, particularly in the context of real-world scenarios. Here, we showed that a variety of brain networks in participants who viewed emotional movies are synchronized among those with higher resilience scores. Brain activity in healthy young adults was measured using a 7T MRI scanner while they naturally watched two movies, one with negative emotional valence and the other with neutral content. Stronger and more extensive resilience-driven neural synchrony, as estimated by inter-subject correlation, was observed in a wider set of brain regions in response to the negative movie compared to the neutral movie. Moreover, we found that high-resilience individuals had similar neural activities to their peers, while low-resilience individuals showed more variable neural activities. Intolerance of uncertainty (IU), a personality trait that shapes biased perception and cognition, modulated resilience-driven neural synchrony differently depending on the emotional valence of movies, indicating IU impacts how individuals process and react to different emotional stimuli. We propose that similar neural responses in resilient individuals signify adaptive emotional processing, fostering social understanding and connections, conversely, the variability in neural responses indicates vulnerability to adverse psychological outcomes. These insights shed light on the neuropsychological mechanisms of resilience, highlighting the maintenance of analogous selective attention, inhibitory control, and social-cognitive functioning to cultivate a collective understanding of negative events.