Abstract
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is characterized by diverse executive function impairments as well as abnormal emotion processing. The goal of the present study was to examine the relationships between emotional response inhibition and distinct PTSD symptom clusters from a six-factor DSM-5 model. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured in an emotional Go/NoGo task among 58 adult survivors from a deadly earthquake. Overall, the commission errors were lower and reaction time was faster for negative pictures compared to neutral pictures. The negative pictures elicited a smaller N2 but larger P3 amplitude compared to neutral and positive pictures, and larger P3 amplitude was further associated with a faster response. Multivariate regression models showed that the PCL score was related to smaller NoGo-N2 amplitude in the negative context, suggesting that the severity of posttraumatic stress symptoms is associated with worse conflict detection. Furthermore, the severity of anhedonia symptom cluster rather than negative affect symptom cluster was associated with fewer commission errors in the positive context, and this result provided electrophysiological evidence for the six-factor model, i.e., a distinction should be made between negative affect symptom cluster and anhedonia symptom cluster.
Highlights
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a severe and complex mental disorder precipitated by exposure to a catastrophic event involving actual or threatened death or injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of him/herself or others (DSM-5)[1]
Neuroimaging studies have shown that fronto-basal ganglia networks, especially pre-supplementary motor area, inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) are critical for inhibiting motor system and response tendencies[8,9,10]
The current study investigated the relationship between posttraumatic stress symptom clusters based on the newly proposed six-factor Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) model and response inhibition process under the emotional context at the behavioral and neural levels
Summary
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a severe and complex mental disorder precipitated by exposure to a catastrophic event involving actual or threatened death or injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of him/herself or others (DSM-5)[1]. Several studies with affective Go/NoGo paradigm in healthy participants have shown that emotional stimuli can influence the performance of response inhibition, as higher false alarm (incorrect NoGo response) rate for positive stimuli than negative and neutral stimuli[20,21,23,27]. Examining the relationships between cognitive functions, such as response inhibition, and severity of PTSD dimensional symptoms on a continuum rating may both yield higher reliabilities[29] and help to further elucidate the psychopathology and core elements that underlie PTSD, in turn improving clinical assessment and intervention. Wu et al.[32] found that NoGo-P3 latency was positively associated with avoidance symptoms in a five-factor dysphoric arousal PTSD model (i.e., re-experiencing, avoidance, negative alterations in mood and cognitions, dysphoric arousal and anxious arousal) based on the DSM-51
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