Fig. 1: Experimental paradigms and analysis stages.

Discovery (a) and validation (b) cohorts underwent two similar but not identical fear induction and rating paradigms during fMRI acquisition. Of note, examples of the fear-evoking photos are pictures only for display purposes and not included in the original stimulus set. The pictures have been obtained from pixabay.com under the Pixabay License, and are free for commercial and noncommercial use across print and digital. c depicts the analytic stages and datasets used in the present study. Specifically, a whole-brain multivariate pattern predictive of the level of subjective experience of fear was trained on the discovery sample (n = 67) using support vector regression and further evaluated in discovery (cross-validated), validation (n = 20), and generalization (n = 31) cohorts. We next systematically applied univariate and multivariate analyses to determine the spatial scale and local contributions of specific regions to the momentary subjective fear representation. Finally, we tested whether subjective fear was encoded with a neural signature that was distinct from the representation of conditioned threat (CS+ versus CS− cues) and general negative affect. GLM general linear model, SVR support vector regression, VIFS visually induced fear signature developed in the current study, AFSS animal fear schema signature developed by Vincent Taschereau-Dumouchel and colleagues, TPS threat-predictive signature developed by Reddan and colleagues, PINES picture-induced negative emotion signature developed by Luke Chang and colleagues. See ‘Methods’ and ‘Results’ for the details of the datasets and brain signatures used in this study.