Leveraging movies to understand brain-body interactions

The autonomic responses of the body—such as heart rate, skin conductance, and breathing—play a critical role in emotional experiences and are often disrupted in mood and anxiety disorders. Understanding how these signals are integrated in the brain, as well as the bidirectional communication between the brain and the body, is essential for unraveling the neurobiological mechanisms underlying these disorders. Naturalistic stimuli, such as movies, offer a powerful tool for eliciting robust, dynamic physiological responses linked to emotions. These stimuli can thus be leveraged for investigating body responses and brain-body dysregulation in clinical populations. In this talk, I will present research using multimodal physiological measures to assess inter-subject consistency during movie viewing. Additionally, I will showcase methodological approaches, including the analysis of brain-body interactions using intracranial EEG for biomarker discovery and precision medicine in mood disorders.