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Open Imaging Index
MRI Brain

Piper movie fMRI in children (ds004228)

Early stressful experiences are associated with reduced neural responses to naturalistic emotional and social content in children

Brain fMRI of typically developing children aged 4 to 11 watching the animated short Piper, collected to relate socioeconomic status, stressful life events and parenting to responses to emotional and social movie events. 70 children from Philadelphia, in BIDS under CC0.

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Overview

This OpenNeuro dataset comes from the Mackey Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. It was shared with a 2022 study that asked whether early stress, measured as family socioeconomic status, stressful life events and observed parenting, relates to how children's brains respond to emotional and social moments in a film. Children watched the five-minute Pixar short Piper, which has no dialogue and shows a young sandpiper and its parent, while functional MRI was recorded. Snapshot 1.0.1 (October 2022) is released under a CC0 waiver.

Composition

There are 70 typically developing children aged 4 to 11 (mean 8.4 years), 48 boys and 22 girls by parent report. They were recruited in and around Philadelphia through two larger studies: 30 from a study of environmental influences on brain development, and 40 typically developing controls from a study of autism at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Of 82 children scanned, 12 were excluded for incomplete movie scans, a registration error or a newly reported ADHD diagnosis. A phenotype table gives age, gender, race, ethnicity, parental education, income, stressful life events, parenting ratings, motion summaries and amygdala response values.

Acquisition

All scans were done on a 3 T Siemens Prisma with a 32-channel head coil. Each child has one multi-echo MPRAGE structural scan with prospective motion correction and one multiband gradient-echo EPI run (2 mm isotropic, TR 2 s, 150 volumes) recorded during the movie.

Annotations

There are no image annotations. An events file marks the movie segments with positive affect, negative affect and parent-child interaction.

Known limitations

  • Children from the autism-study arm (40) watched the movie without sound; the others heard the soundtrack.
  • Parenting behaviour was observed only in the 30 children from the first study.
  • One session per child, with no follow-up and no adult comparison group.
  • Only the final analysis sample is released; excluded children are not included.

Cohort

Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 70 subjects.

Sex

  • Female 22 31%
  • Male 48 69%

Table 1 in Park et al. 2022, Early stressful experiences are associated with reduced neural responses to naturalistic emotional and social content in children, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Contrast / sequence

Groups can overlap

  • T1-weighted 70 100%
  • BOLD fMRI 70 100%

sub-*/ses-01/anat, sub-*/ses-01/func in OpenNeuro ds004228 snapshot 1.0.1 (dataset_description.json, CHANGES, snapshot summary and file tree)

Field strength

  • 3 T 70 100%

Section 2.3.1 in Park et al. 2022, Early stressful experiences are associated with reduced neural responses to naturalistic emotional and social content in children, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Age

mean 8.4, range 4.3 to 11.9

0
10
20
29
4-56-78-910-11

age_scan in phenotype/questionnaires.tsv of ds004228 snapshot 1.0.1 (CC0), counted per row; Section 2.1 in Park et al. 2022, Early stressful experiences are associated with reduced neural responses to naturalistic emotional and social content in children, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Scanner vendor

  • Siemens Healthineers 70 100%

Section 2.3.1 in Park et al. 2022, Early stressful experiences are associated with reduced neural responses to naturalistic emotional and social content in children, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Country

  • United States 70 100%

Section 2.1 in Park et al. 2022, Early stressful experiences are associated with reduced neural responses to naturalistic emotional and social content in children, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Age by sex

Reported cross table. Missing cells were not published (fewer than 10 or not reported).

Female Male
  • n/a
    10-11
    10
  • n/a
    8-9
    20
  • n/a
    6-7
    15

age_scan and male in phenotype/questionnaires.tsv of ds004228 snapshot 1.0.1 (CC0), counted per row

Contrast combinations

How many subjects have exactly each set of contrasts.

T1wboldSubjects with exactly this set
70

sub-*/ses-01 in OpenNeuro ds004228 snapshot 1.0.1 (dataset_description.json, CHANGES, snapshot summary and file tree)

License and access

Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer

Access
Open download

Download without an account

Access page

Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal

Public domain dedication. Do anything with the data, including commercial use, without asking and without having to give credit.

dataset_description.json of snapshot 1.0.1 states "License" CC0.

Original license text Version read: 1.0 Checked 2026-10-07

What you can do

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you can share

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you must do

  • No
  • Share alike No
  • No
  • No
  • Manuscript review No
  • Release code No
  • Return results No
  • Delete after use No

Limits

  • No
  • Location limits No

Citation

Park AT, Richardson H, Tooley UA, McDermott CL, Boroshok AL, Ke A, Leonard JA, Tisdall MD, Deater-Deckard K, Edgar JC, Mackey AP. Early stressful experiences are associated with reduced neural responses to naturalistic emotional and social content in children. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 57, 101152 (2022). doi:10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101152

Sources

Every number on this page comes from one of these documents. Each chart names the table or page it is taken from. The raw numbers are in stats.csv.