Neurobehavioral correlates of impaired emotion recognition in pediatric PTSD

Despite broad evidence suggesting that adversity-exposed youth experience an impaired ability to recognize emotion in others, the underlying biological mechanisms remains elusive. This study uses a multimethod approach to target the neurological substrates of this phenomenon in a well-phenotyped sam...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Development and psychopathology 2022-08, Vol.34 (3), p.946-956
Main Authors: Heyn, Sara A., Schmit, Collin, Keding, Taylor J., Wolf, Richard, Herringa, Ryan J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Age
Amygdala
Amygdala - diagnostic imaging
Anger
Attention
Child
Child development
Children & youth
Comorbidity
Emotions
Eye movements
Facial Expression
Functional magnetic resonance imaging
Hippocampus
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Neural networks
Neurobiology
Neuroimaging
Pediatrics
Physiology
Post traumatic stress disorder
Psychosocial development
Regular Article
Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - diagnostic imaging
Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - psychology
Teenagers
Trauma
Visual pathways
Visual perception
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Summary:Despite broad evidence suggesting that adversity-exposed youth experience an impaired ability to recognize emotion in others, the underlying biological mechanisms remains elusive. This study uses a multimethod approach to target the neurological substrates of this phenomenon in a well-phenotyped sample of youth meeting diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Twenty-one PTSD-afflicted youth and 23 typically developing (TD) controls completed clinical interview schedules, an emotion recognition task with eye-tracking, and an implicit emotion processing task during functional magnetic resonance imaging )fMRI). PTSD was associated with decreased accuracy in identification of angry, disgust, and neutral faces as compared to TD youth. Of note, these impairments occurred despite the normal deployment of visual attention in youth with PTSD relative to TD youth. Correlation with a related fMRI task revealed a group by accuracy interaction for amygdala–hippocampus functional connectivity (FC) for angry expressions, where TD youth showed a positive relationship between anger accuracy and amygdala–hippocampus FC; this relationship was reversed in youth with PTSD. These findings are a novel characterization of impaired threat recognition within a well-phenotyped population of severe pediatric PTSD. Further, the differential amygdala–hippocampus FC identified in youth with PTSD may imply aberrant efficiency of emotional contextualization circuits.
ISSN:0954-5794
1469-2198
1469-2198
DOI:10.1017/S0954579420001704