Syed Ali Hussain

Recent work using neuroimaging has shown that brain responses to a movie are similar across viewers. These similar responses emerge because the movie recruits brain systems involved in sensory (e.g., responding to the flickering lights on screen), perceptual (e.g., identifying the characters’ faces), and social-cognitive processing (e.g., following and understanding the story, social, and affective responses) – separately in each individual brain, but collectively across the audience. Here we compare brain response similarities during an engaging, social, and nonverbal 5-minute Pixar movie across two levels: First, we show that at a macro-level, the movie-evoked brain responses among the current audience from Australia are correlated with the brain responses to the same movie watched by an audience from the USA. Second, we investigate whether twins, who maximize the preexisting similarity two individual audience members can have, exhibit more similar brain responses to the same movie. We find that shared responses measured in an audience from Australia were highly correlated with responses from an audience watching the same movie in the USA. Second, we find that twins (who are genetically more similar and usually raised in a similar environment) exhibit more strongly aligned brain responses compared to non-twin participants. These results support our predictions about the role of pre-existing similarities among audiences for brain-to-brain coupling during movie reception. Moreover, they suggest that brain-to-brain similarities in response to movies contain information about similarities at the social level.