Citation

Moser DA, Aue T, Suardi F, Kutlikova H, Cordero MI, Rossignol AS, Favez N, Rusconi S, Schechter DS. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 2014; 10(5): 645-653.

Affiliation

University of Geneva Hospitals and Faculty of Medicine, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry University of Geneva, Faculty of Medicine.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/scan/nsu099

PMID

25062841

Abstract

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a disorder that involves impaired regulation of the fear response to traumatic reminders. This study tested how women with male-perpetrated interpersonal violence-related PTSD (IPV-PTSD) differed in their brain activation from healthy controls (HC) when exposed to scenes of male-female interaction of differing emotional content. Sixteen women with symptoms of IPV-PTSD and 19 HC participated in this study. During MRI, participants watched a stimulus-protocol of 23 different 20-second silent epochs of male-female interactions taken from feature films, which were either neutral, menacing, or prosocial. IPV-PTSD participants compared to HC showed (a) greater dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activation in response to menacing versus prosocial scenes and (b) greater anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), right hippocampus activation and lower ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activty in response to emotional vs. neutral scenes. The fact that IPV-PTSD participants compared to HC showed lower activity of the ventral ACC during emotionally charged scenes regardless of the valence of the scenes suggests that impaired social perception among IPV-PTSD patients transcends menacing contexts and generalizes to a wider variety of emotionally charged male-female interactions.

Language: en