Subliminal Trauma Reminders Impact Neural Processing of Cognitive Control in Adults with Developmental Earthquake Trauma: A Preliminary Report

Publication Date

3-2016

Document Type

Article

Organizational Units

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology

Keywords

Developmental trauma, Cognitive control, Earthquake, Subliminal priming, Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

Abstract

Little is known about the effects of developmental trauma on the neural basis of cognitive control among adults who do not have posttraumatic stress disorder. To examine this question, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the effect of subliminal priming with earthquake-related images on attentional control during a Stroop task in survivors of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China (survivor group, survivors were adolescents at the time of the earthquake) and in matched controls (control group). We found that the survivor group showed greater activation in the left ventral anterior cingulate cortex (vACC) and the bilateral parahippocampal gyrus during the congruent versus incongruent condition, as compared to the control group. Depressive symptoms were positively correlated with left vACC activation during the congruent condition. Moreover, psychophysiological interaction results showed that the survivor group had stronger functional connectivity between the left parahippocampal gyrus and the left vACC than the control group under the congruent–incongruent condition. These results suggested that trauma-related information was linked to abnormal activity in brain networks associated with cognitive control (e.g., vACC–parahippocampal gyrus). This may be a potential biomarker for depression following developmental trauma, and it may also provide a mechanism linking trauma reminders with depression.

Copyright Date

12-15-2015

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Rights Holder

Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Provenance

Received from CHORUS

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

12 pgs

File Size

789 KB

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. User is responsible for all copyright compliance. This article was originally published as:

Du, X., Li, Y., Ran, Q., Kim, P., Ganzel, B. L., Liang, G., . . ., & Qiu, J. (2016). Subliminal trauma reminders impact neural processing of cognitive control in adults with developmental earthquake trauma: A preliminary report. Experimental Brain Research, 234(3), 905-916. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-015-4502-7

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative.

Publication Title

Experimental Brain Research

Volume

234

Issue

3

First Page

905

Last Page

916

ISSN

1432-1106

PubMed ID

26670907

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