emotion-videos 🟠 Alpha¶


Subjects	5 — `sub-01` ✅ · `sub-02` ✅ · `sub-03` ✅ · `sub-04` ❌ · `sub-05` ✅ · `sub-06` ✅
Maturity	🟠 Alpha — Not fully acquired or released, or missing a README.
Tasks	📺 Silent emotion-evoking video clips — ~5.2 hours of naturalistic silent video watching per subject; clips are shared across subjects but not repeated within
Data	🧠 fMRI — 5.2 h/subject
	🎬 Naturalistic video — 5.2 h/subject
	🫀 ECG — 5.2 h/subject
	🫁 Respiration — 5.2 h/subject
	🫀 Pulse — 5.2 h/subject
	😓 Skin conductance (EDA) — 5.2 h/subject
	👁️ Eye tracking — 5.2 h/subject
Assets	📁 BIDS · 🧠 fMRIPrep · 🫀 PhysPrep

How to cite

Picard, M., St-Laurent, M., DuPre, E., Pinsard, B., Boyle, J., et al. (2026). CNeuroMod-emotionvideos, a densely-sampled multimodal dataset for affective neuroscience.

Contributors

Conceptualization: Marie-Ève Picard · Basile Pinsard · Julie A. Boyle · Pierre Rainville · Lune Bellec

Data curation: Marie-Ève Picard · Marie St-Laurent · Delphine Aguiar · Basile Pinsard

Formal analysis: Marie-Ève Picard · Elizabeth DuPre

Funding acquisition: Julie A. Boyle · Lune Bellec

Investigation: Marie-Ève Picard

Methodology: Marie-Ève Picard

Project administration: Basile Pinsard · Julie A. Boyle · Lune Bellec

Resources: Julie A. Boyle · Lune Bellec

Software: Marie-Ève Picard · Marie St-Laurent · Delphine Aguiar

Supervision: Pierre Rainville · Lune Bellec

Visualization: Marie-Ève Picard · Marie St-Laurent · Delphine Aguiar

Writing – original draft: Marie-Ève Picard

Writing – review & editing: Marie-Ève Picard · Marie St-Laurent

Funding: Courtois Foundation · NSERC (RGPIN-2025-06022) · FRQNT (scholarship to Marie-Ève Picard)

Overview¶

Five participants (sub-01, sub-02, sub-03, sub-05, sub-06) watched 1888 silent short video clips from the Cowen & Keltner (2017) database (https://www.alancowen.com/video), which evoke a broad range of affective states. Each clip was normed on 34 emotion categories and 14 affective dimensions by an independent sample; no ratings were collected from CNeuroMod participants. Multi-echo fMRI was acquired together with ECG, PPG, electrodermal activity, respiration and eye-tracking. Each video was shown once per participant.

Stimuli¶

The database contains 2185 silent clips. Clips lasting more than 20 s (46 clips) were discarded, and the remaining clips were screened by two evaluators for extreme content (e.g. pornography, murder, animal abuse; 251 clips removed). Clips shorter than 1 s were looped so that they were shown for at least 1 s.

Imaging sessions¶

Participants completed 36 runs of 8:20 min over 6 to 7 sessions. Each run contained 45 to 65 clips separated by an inter-trial interval of 3, 4, 5 or 6 s (randomized). A fixation marker (three concentric circles) was shown for 1.5 s before each clip and used for eye-tracking drift correction. Each run started with an instruction screen asking participants to keep their eyes open and fixate the marker. Clip order within a run is the same for all participants, whereas run order is randomized per participant. Stimuli were presented with task_stimuli.

Physiology and eye-tracking¶

Physiological signals were recorded with a BIOPAC MP160 system: 3-lead ECG, PPG (right hallux for four participants, right posterior tibial artery for one), skin conductance on the arch of the right foot, and a respiration belt at the abdominal or thoracic level. Eye-tracking was recorded from the right eye with a Pupil Core camera at 250 Hz, with a 9-point calibration before each run.

Preprocessing¶

fmriprep: fMRIPrep 25.2.3, with each echo in native space.
tedana: optimal combination and denoising with tedana 25.1.0.
tsnr: temporal SNR maps.
physprep: preprocessed and quality-checked physiological data.
mriqc: image quality metrics.

Acquisition notes¶

Some functional runs were excluded because of technical problems or human error.

Subject	Session	Notes
`sub-01`	`ses-002`	Interrupted after the first run (`run-01`) because of a scanner issue.
`sub-02`	`ses-003`	Only one session was acquired.
`sub-03`	`ses-001`	Whole session discarded (`run-01` to `run-03`) because of a stimulus projection problem; stimuli were repeated in `ses-002`.
`sub-05`	`ses-002`	`run-02` and `run-04` repeat `run-04` and `run-01` of `ses-001`, respectively, because of an acquisition error.

Eye-tracking issues:

Subject	Session	Notes
`sub-01`	`ses-005`	The fiber optic of the eye-tracker was not working properly.
`sub-03`	`ses-002`	Eye-tracking data discarded because of equipment issues: images were darker than usual, making pupil detection harder.
`sub-05`	`ses-005`	The eye-tracking software crashed after the first run and could not restart.
`sub-05`	`ses-006`	The eye-tracking software crashed in the middle of `run-05` and `run-06`.
`sub-06`	`ses-004`	Problems with pupil detection; only `run-06` had to be discarded.