Cognition-centric brain activity across diverse imaging tasks constrains the representation of mental health in brain function data

Using factor analysis of 87 neurocognitive and psychiatric assessments and tensor independent component analysis (ICA) of fMRI data acquired during five common task and movie-watching paradigms in 1,200 healthy young adults, we examined the extent to which individual differences in cognition versus mental health are reflected in brain activity. Across all brain network variants evoked across all paradigms—emotional face matching, gambling, working memory, social cognition, and movie watching—only individual differences in cognition were significantly or reproducibly reflected in brain activity, despite similar reliability and interindividual variability across five mental health domains. These findings suggest that standard neuroimaging paradigms may lack sufficient emotional provocation to capture non-cognitive aspects of mental health variation in healthy populations, with implications for the use of task fMRI in transdiagnostic mental health research.