2 research outputs found
Avoidant symptoms in PTSD predict fear circuit activation during multimodal fear extinction
Convergent evidence suggests that individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
exhibit exaggerated avoidance behaviors as well as abnormalities in Pavlonian fear
conditioning. However, the link between the two features of this disorder is not well
understood. In order to probe the brain basis of aberrant extinction learning in PTSD, we
administered a multimodal classical fear conditioning/extinction paradigm that incorporated
affectively relevant information from two sensory channels (visual and tactile) while
participants underwent fMRI scanning. The sample consisted of fifteen OEF/OIF veterans
with PTSD. In response to conditioned cues and contextual information, greater avoidance
symptomatology was associated with greater activation in amygdala, hippocampus,
vmPFC, dmPFC, and insula, during both fear acquisition and fear extinction. Heightened
responses to previously conditioned stimuli in individuals with more severe PTSD could
indicate a deficiency in safety learning, consistent with PTSD symptomatology. The close
link between avoidance symptoms and fear circuit activation suggests that this symptom
cluster may be a key component of fear extinction deficits in PTSD and/or may be particularly
amenable to change through extinction-based therapie
Childhood Poverty Predicts Adult Amygdala and Frontal Activity and Connectivity in Response to Emotional Faces
Childhood poverty negatively impacts physical and mental health in adulthood. Altered brain development in response to social and environmental factors associated with poverty likely contributes to this effect, engendering maladaptive patterns of social attribution and/or elevated physiological stress. In this fMRI study, we examined the association between childhood poverty and neural processing of social signals (i.e., emotional faces) in adulthood. 52 subjects from a longitudinal prospective study recruited as children, participated in a brain imaging study at 23-25 years of age using the Emotional Faces Assessment Task (EFAT). Childhood poverty, independent of concurrent adult income, was associated with higher amygdala and mPFC responses to threat vs. happy faces. Also, childhood poverty was associated with decreased functional connectivity between left amygdala and mPFC. This study is unique because it prospectively links childhood poverty to emotional processing during adulthood, suggesting a candidate neural mechanism for negative social-emotional bias. Adults who grew up poor appear to be more sensitive to social threat cues and less sensitive to positive social cues