Making movies for psychiatric imaging

Psychiatric disorders are associated with higher-order symptoms—low mood, anhedonia, paranoia, negative thinking, complex delusions, generalized worries, and the list goes on. Naturalistic conditions offer potential to evoke these types of symptoms, and to drive related circuitry, in systematic ways. However, the process of creating bespoke naturalistic conditions is as complex as the stimuli themselves and is different from the process used to create conventional task-based paradigms. This talk will cover different approaches to using movie-based stimuli in relation to psychiatric symptoms and clinically based treatment designs, outline specific challenges and tensions (including cultural and patient-partnered approaches) involved in the process of making these stimuli, and chart some possible paths forward to enhance rigor, generalizability and open-science collaboration in this subfield.