Neural predictors of subjective fear depend on the situation

ABSTRSCTThe extent to which neural representations of fear experience depend on or generalize across the situational context has remained unclear. We systematically manipulated variation within and across three distinct fearevocative situations including fear of heights, spiders, and social threats. Participants (n=21, 10 females and 11 males) viewed 20 second clips depicting spiders, heights, or social encounters, and rated fear after each video. Searchlight multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) was used to identify whether and which brain regions carry information that predicts fear experience, and the degree to which the fear-predictive neural codes in these areas depend upon or generalize across the situations. The overwhelming majority of brain regions carrying information about fear did so in a situation dependent manner. These findings suggest that local neural representations of fear experience are unlikely to involve a singular pattern, but rather a collection of multiple heterogeneous brain states