Atypical visual processing in posttraumatic stress disorder

Atypical visual processing in posttraumatic stress disorder☆

BACKGROUND Many patients with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) feel overwhelmed in situations with high levels of sensory input, as in crowded situations with complex sensory characteristics. These difficulties might be related to subtle sensory processing deficits similar to those that have been found for sounds in electrophysiological studies. METHOD Visual processing was investigated w...

Processing threatening information in posttraumatic stress disorder.

The authors used a modified Stroop task to study how people with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) process threatening information. Participants were motor vehicle accident (MVA) survivors with either PTSD (n = 15), simple phobia of driving (n = 15), or low anxiety (n = 15). Participants named colors of 4 types of words: strong threat words (MVA related), mild threat words (MVA related), pos...

Altered processing of visual emotional stimuli in posttraumatic stress disorder: an event-related potential study.

Patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) display abnormal emotional processing and bias towards emotional content. Most neurophysiological studies in PTSD found higher amplitudes of event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to trauma-related visual content. Here we aimed to characterize brain electrical activity in PTSD subjects in response to non-trauma-related emotion-laden pictur...

Impaired allocentric spatial processing in posttraumatic stress disorder

A neurobiological dual representation model of PTSD proposes that reduced hippocampus-dependent contextual processing contributes to intrusive imagery due to a loss of control over hippocampus-independent sensory and affective representations. We investigated whether PTSD sufferers show impaired allocentric spatial processing indicative of reduced hippocampal functioning. Trauma-exposed individ...

Attentional Processing in Traumatic Brain Injury and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder