Neural Mechanisms of Emotion-behaviour Interactions

NCT07623746 | Not Yet Recruiting

• 2 other identifiers: 69HCL25_11232025-A02658-41
• Study Type: interventional
• Target: 120
• Locations: 1 country
• Sites: 1

Brief Summary

Deciding what to do when for how long - self-organizing one's behaviour - is an important feature of daily life. Emotions arise providing short-cuts for the computational complexities. Yet, one still knows relatively little about the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms. EMOBB will establish the computational, cognitive and neural underpinnings of the rich interplay between emotions and self-organized behaviour in naturalistic environments. Previous work has almost exclusively relied on tasks structured into experimenter determined trials - thus how people self-organized behaviour could not be measured. To overcome this, EMOBB will combine novel naturalistic tasks in which people have freedom what to do when for how long with subjective and objective measurements of emotions. This will be made possible through a computational modelling approach that allows dissecting and quantifying even complex behaviour-emotion interactions. Specifically, EMOBB will use three cognitive tasks of emotion-behaviour interplay that participants will do while undergoing functional magnetic resonance brain imaging and monitoring of their facial expressions with an MRI-compatible camera. The primary hypothesis of EMOBB is that both unique and shared neural networks will underpin the interplay between emotions and behaviour across our cognitive tasks.

Conditions

Healthy Volunteer

Keywords

FMRI; Emotions; Cognition

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcomes (1)

• Brain activity in regions of interest

  Brain activity is captured as percentage change in blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal with FMRI compared to baseline across tasks across brain regions (ventromedial prefrontal cortex, vmPFC; dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, dACC).

  Day 0

Secondary Outcomes (3)

• Brain activity during task 1 (Self-organization under threat)

  Day 0

• Brain activity during task 2 (Self-organization and learning)

  Day 0

• Brain activity during task 3 (Self-organization and social context)

  Day 0

Study Arms (3)

Task 1: self-organization under threat

EXPERIMENTAL

Other: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

Task 2: self-organization and learning

EXPERIMENTAL

Other: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

Task 3 : self-organization and social context

EXPERIMENTAL

Other: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

Interventions

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) OTHER

Participants will perform a cognitive task (responses through button presses) while we measure brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and record their facial expressions.

Task 1: self-organization under threat; Task 2: self-organization and learning; Task 3 : self-organization and social context

Eligibility Criteria

• Age: 18 Years - 45 Years
• Sex: all
• Healthy Volunteers: Yes
• Age Groups: Adult (18-64)

You may qualify if:

• years old,
• fluent French speakers,
• healthy,
• without a beard at the time of testing,
• right-handed,
• being able to use both hands
• BMI between 18.5 and 30
• give written informed consen
• for women: contraception;

You may not qualify if:

• neurological, psychiatric disorders, or severe chronic disorders (diabetes, cardiac, kidney, lung, liver disorders, inflammatory disorders)
• pregnancy or breast-feeding
• under guardianship, currently admitted to a psychiatric hospital other than for research purposes)
• not wanting to be informed of abnormalities detected during MRI scan,

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Hospices Civils de Lyon: lead

Study Sites (1)

CERMEP (Centre d'Etude de Recherche Multimodal et pluridisciplinaire en imagerie du vivant)

Bron, 69500, France

Location

Study Officials

• Jacqueline SCHOLL, PhD

  Institut National de la Santé Et de la Recherche Médicale, France

  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Central Study Contacts

Jacqueline SCHOLL, PhD

CONTACT

+ 33; jacqueline.scholl@inserm.fr

Study Design

• Study Type: interventional
• Phase: not applicable
• Allocation: NON RANDOMIZED
• Masking: NONE
• Purpose: BASIC SCIENCE
• Intervention Model: PARALLEL
• Sponsor Type: OTHER
• Responsible Party: SPONSOR

Study Record Dates

• First Submitted: May 20, 2026
• First Posted: June 3, 2026
• Study Start (Estimated): October 1, 2026
• Primary Completion (Estimated): October 1, 2030
• Study Completion (Estimated): October 10, 2030
• Last Updated: June 3, 2026

Record last verified: 2026-05

Locations

FR (1)