Transient and sustained BOLD signal time courses affect the detection of emotion-related brain activation in fMRI.

A tremendous amount of effort has been dedicated to unravel the functional neuroanatomy of the processing and regulation of emotion, resulting in a well-described picture of limbic, para-limbic and prefrontal regions involved. Studies applying functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) often use the block-wise presentation of stimuli with affective content, and conventionally model brain activation as a function of stimulus or task duration. However, there is increasing evidence that regional brain responses may not always translate to task duration and rather show stimulus onset-related transient time courses. We assume that brain regions showing transient responses cannot be detected in…