Neural correlates of emotional reactivity and regulation in traumatized North Korean refugees

Abstract

Refugees often report heightened emotional reactivity and emotion regulation difficulties and are at high risk for mental health problems. Given that refugees are repeatedly exposed to traumatic events that may cause changes in the brain, the present study examined neural correlates of emotional reactivity and regulation and their associations with refugee features (e.g., cumulative trauma) and the severity of psychiatric symptoms (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]) in North Korean (NK) refugees. Forty NK refugees with trauma exposure and varying levels of psychopathology and 41 healthy South Korean (SK) controls without trauma exposure participated in this study. They performed an emotion regulation task during a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) assessment. Region of interest (ROI), whole brain, and generalized psychophysiological interaction (gPPI) analyses were conducted. NK refugees with trauma exposure and varying levels of psychopathology showed increased activation in response to negative socio-affective pictures in regions involved in affective processing, including the amygdala and hippocampus, relative to healthy SK controls without trauma exposure. They also exhibited greater prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation, amygdala–PFC functional connectivity (FC), and hippocampal–PFC FC during emotion regulation. More severe PTSD symptoms were associated with greater hippocampal response to negative pictures (vs. neutral pictures) in NK refugees. This study provides neuroscientific evidence for neural alterations in association with emotional reactivity and regulation in traumatized refugees. These findings may contribute to a better mechanistic understanding of emotional reactivity and regulation in refugees and suggest potential ways to address the emotional and mental problems of traumatized refugees.