Manuscript

While naturalistic stimuli like movies better resemble the complexity of the real world and are perhaps crucial to understanding the dynamics of emotion processing, there is limited research on emotions with naturalistic stimuli. There is a need to understand the temporal dynamics of emotion processing and their relationship to different dimensions of emotion experience. In addition, there is a need to understand the dynamics of functional connectivity underlying different emotional experiences that occur during or prior to such experiences. To address these questions, we recorded EEG and asked participants to mark the temporal location of their emotional experience as they watched a video. We also obtained self-assessment ratings for emotional multimedia stimuli. We obtained dynamic functional connectivity (DFC) patterns in all the frequency bands. We also performed regression analysis to evaluate whether temporal variability in DFC (tvDFC) could predict different dimensions of emotional experience. We observed that the connectivity patterns in the upper beta band could differentiate emotion categories better during or prior to the reported emotional experience. The functional connectivity dynamics is primarily related to emotional arousal followed by dominance. The hubs in the functional networks were found across the right frontal and bilateral parietal lobes, which have been reported to facilitate affect, interoception, action and memory related processing. The results support constructivist theories of emotional experience and show that changes in dynamic functional connectivity can predict aspects of our emotional experience.