Trait anxiety is associated with idiosyncratic neural event boundaries during naturalistic movie-watching

Abstract

Anxiety is associated with altered patterns of attention to images and objects, but how it influences the perception of continuous experiences remains underexplored. Here, we examined whether trait anxiety is associated with differences in how the brain segments continuous experience into events. Using a large-scale open-access dataset and data-driven methods to detect neural event boundaries, we compared neural event segmentation between healthy adults with high (N=60) and low trait-level anxiety (N=60) as they viewed a short suspenseful film. While the cortical temporal hierarchy was preserved across groups, high-anxiety individuals had more idiosyncratic event boundaries, exhibiting reduced alignment to both low-anxiety individuals and one another. This divergence was most pronounced in the dorsal attention and frontoparietal control networks, suggesting that trait anxiety is associated with idiosyncratic temporal organization in systems involved in attentional control. Furthermore, boundary variability in high-anxiety participants was greater during moments rated as more anxiety-provoking by a large language model, controlling for arousal, valence, and low-level visual features. Together, these findings suggest that anxious individuals organize continuous experience in a more individualized manner. More broadly, they offer a neurocomputational framework for investigating how trait-level variability interacts with narrative content to shape naturalistic event perception.