AUTHOR=Saarimäki Heini 

TITLE=Naturalistic Stimuli in Affective Neuroimaging: A Review

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

VOLUME=15

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2021.675068

DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2021.675068

ISSN=1662-5161

ABSTRACT=<p>Naturalistic stimuli such as movies, music, and spoken and written stories elicit strong emotions and allow brain imaging of emotions in close-to-real-life conditions. Emotions are multi-component phenomena: relevant stimuli lead to automatic changes in multiple functional components including perception, physiology, behavior, and conscious experiences. Brain activity during naturalistic stimuli reflects all these changes, suggesting that parsing emotion-related processing during such complex stimulation is not a straightforward task. Here, I review affective neuroimaging studies that have employed naturalistic stimuli to study emotional processing, focusing especially on experienced emotions. I argue that to investigate emotions with naturalistic stimuli, we need to define and extract <italic>emotion features</italic> from both the stimulus and the observer.</p>