@ARTICLE{10.3389/fnhum.2012.00298, AUTHOR={Tikka, Pia and Väljamäe, Aleksander and de Borst, Aline and Pugliese, Roberto and Ravaja, Niklas and Kaipainen, Mauri and Takala, Tapio}, TITLE={Enactive cinema paves way for understanding complex real-time social interaction in neuroimaging experiments}, JOURNAL={Frontiers in Human Neuroscience}, VOLUME={6}, YEAR={2012}, URL={https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00298}, DOI={10.3389/fnhum.2012.00298}, ISSN={1662-5161}, ABSTRACT={We outline general theoretical and practical implications of what we promote as enactive cinema for the neuroscientific study of online socio-emotional interaction. In a real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rt-fMRI) setting, participants are immersed in cinematic experiences that simulate social situations. While viewing, their physiological reactions—including brain responses—are tracked, representing implicit and unconscious experiences of the on-going social situations. These reactions, in turn, are analyzed in real-time and fed back to modify the cinematic sequences they are viewing while being scanned. Due to the engaging cinematic content, the proposed setting focuses on living-by in terms of shared psycho-physiological epiphenomena of experience rather than active coping in terms of goal-oriented motor actions. It constitutes a means to parametrically modify stimuli that depict social situations and their broader environmental contexts. As an alternative to studying the variation of brain responses as a function of a priori fixed stimuli, this method can be applied to survey the range of stimuli that evoke similar responses across participants at particular brain regions of interest.} }