Investigating time-varying functional connectivity derived from the Jackknife Correlation method for distinguishing between emotions in fMRI data.

Investigating human brain activity during expressing emotional states provides deep insight into complex cognitive functions and neurological correlations inside the brain. To be able to resemble the brain function in the best manner, a complex and natural stimulus should be applied as well, the method used for data analysis should have fewer assumptions, simplifications, and parameter adjustment. In this study, we examined a functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset obtained during an emotional audio-movie stimulus associated with human life. We used Jackknife Correlation (JC) method to derive a representation of time-varying functional connectivity. We applied different binary measures and thoroughly investigated two weighted measures to study different properties of binary and weighted temporal networks. Using this approach, we indicated different aspects of human brain function during expressing different emotions. The findings of global and nodal measures could demonstrate a significant difference between emotions and significant regions in each emotion, respectively. Also, the temporal centrality properties of nodes were different in emotional states. Ultimately, we showed that the resulting measures of temporal snapshots created by JC method can distinguish between different emotions. © Springer Nature B.V. 2020.