MIDUS 2 Neuroscience

Project 5 of the MIDUS 2 wave is the Neuroscience Project of Midlife in the United States. Between 2004 and 2009 it brought a subsample of MIDUS 2 and Milwaukee participants to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to measure how people differ in reacting to and recovering from emotional pictures, using psychophysiology, EEG and brain MRI, so that these measures can be linked to the health, cognitive and social data of the other MIDUS projects. Carol Ryff and Richard Davidson lead the project. ICPSR study 28683 holds only the psychophysiological and behavioral variables. Raw structural, task fMRI and perfusion images sit in the restricted MIDUS Neuroscience Repository on Globus and are released after a research plan is approved and a data use agreement is signed.

Composition

331 participants, all of whom had completed the MIDUS 2 survey and the biomarker project in Madison: 223 from the longitudinal national sample and 108 from the Milwaukee sample. Not everyone took part in the MRI session, and the number of scanned participants is not stated in public documentation. Age and sex of the imaged group are not published for the full project.

Acquisition

A GE Signa 3 T scanner at the Waisman Brain Imaging Core with a quadrature head coil, as described in a study that used 72 of the scanned participants. The session included five runs of an emotional picture task with neutral face probes (gradient-echo EPI, TR 2 s), field maps and a T1w inversion-recovery fast gradient echo image. The repository also lists resting perfusion (ASL) images for this wave; resting-state fMRI and diffusion imaging are listed only for later waves. Resting EEG from the same project is shared in BIDS under a separate agreement.

Known limitations

• Raw images only by application, for a named study team; collaborators at other institutions must apply separately.
• Single scanner and single site; the scanner and coil differ from those of the later MIDUS waves.
• The detailed restricted access documentation for MIDUS 2 is not yet published, so per-sequence counts are unknown.
• No public FreeSurfer or diffusion summary measures exist for this wave.