circRNA_013145‑miR‑185‑5p‑RhoA axis: A novel mechanism in the pathophysiology of diabetes‑induced erectile dysfunction.

Emotional narratives are a primary vehicle through which people share and make sense of affective experience, inviting listeners into a shared cognitive–emotional space (; ). Intersubject correlation (ISC) of neural activity provides a window into this sharing: the degree to which listeners’ brain responses converge as they hear the same narrative reflects how similarly they process it, with high ISC indicating shared cognitive-affective processing and low ISC idiosyncratic processing shaped by individual context (; ; ; ). Indeed, studies using naturalistic emotional stimuli have shown that affectively engaging narratives and films evoke widespread neural synchrony across listeners, particularly in regions associated with emotional appraisal, language comprehension, and social cognition (; ; , ; ). Although ISC was developed in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it can also be computed on the amplitude envelopes of band-limited magnetoencephalography (MEG) oscillations—a comparatively small literature applied mainly to silent movie viewing (; Chang ; ) and continuous speech (). Whereas fMRI ISC indexes shared slow hemodynamic dynamics, envelope ISC indexes the similarity of oscillatory dynamics within specific frequency bands, allowing shared processing arising from distinct neural mechanisms to be dissociated by frequency. Yet listeners do not approach emotional stories as blank slates. Their motivational state (whether they are oriented toward engagement or withdrawal) may fundamentally shape how they process emotional content, and thus how closely their neural responses align with those of other listeners (; ). Approach and avoidance are fundamental motivational orientations that shape how individuals perceive, attend to, and respond to emotional information (; ). Specific emotions carry their own motivational signatures: fear is linked to avoidance, anger to approach (; ). We organize the congruence predictions with a fluency–engagement contrast, which we treat as a heuristic framework rather than as competing formal theories. Each pole draws on an established tradition. The fluency account extends processing-fluency principles: when a listener’s motivational state aligns with the emotion’s direction, processing is eased, predicting that alignment enhances convergent processing. The engagement account extends predictive-coding views of beta as a sustained top-down signal (): when state and emotion conflict, the listener cannot readily disengage, and conflict instead sustains shared processing by demanding more effortful, stimulus-driven attention. We use this contrast to organize the exploratory analysis of congruent versus conflicting conditions. Beyond experimentally induced motivational states, individuals differ in their chronic sensitivity to threat and punishment. The behavioral inhibition system (; ) reflects a dispositional avoidance bias, a heightened reactivity to aversive cues, novel stimuli, and signals of potential punishment (). This heightened threat sensitivity may bias appraisal of aversive narrative content toward idiosyncratic, threat-focused processing, altering a listener’s neural synchrony with the group. Whether trait inhibition predicts who diverges from shared processing, and whether it interacts with state-level motivation × emotion dynamics, is a central question of the present study.