Moving toward reality: Electrocortical reactivity to naturalistic multimodal emotional videos.

While previous research has investigated the effects of emotional videos on peripheral physiological measures and conscious experience, this study extends the research to include electrocortical measures, specifically the steady‐state visual‐evoked potential (ssVEP). A carefully curated set of 45 videos, designed to represent a wide range of emotional and neutral content, were presented with a flickering border. The videos featured a continuous single‐shot perspective, natural soundtrack, and excluded elements associated with professional films, to enhance realism. The results demonstrate a consistent reduction in ssVEP amplitude during emotional videos which strongly correlates with the rated emotional intensity of the clips. This suggests that narrative audiovisual stimuli have the potential to track dynamic emotional processing in the cortex, providing new avenues for research in affective neuroscience. The findings highlight the potential of using realistic video stimuli to investigate how the human brain processes emotional events in a paradigm that increases ecological validity. Future studies can further develop this paradigm by expanding the video set, targeting specific cortical networks, and manipulating narrative predictability. Overall, this study establishes a foundation for investigating emotional perception using realistic video stimuli and has the potential to expand our understanding of real‐world emotional processing in the human brain. Affective neuroscience research depends on the ability to evoke states of emotion that are comparable to real‐life situations. Here we demonstrate a novel laboratory paradigm in which electrocortical effects can be estimated during naturalistic emotional multimodal video perception. Realistic video stimuli may enable research questions regarding dynamic emotional processes to be investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]