Attentional Bias to Social Threat in PTSD

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is related to hypersensitive responses to potential threat (Klein, Schindler, Neuner, Rosner, Renneberg, Steil et al., 2019). These authors investigated the ERP correlates to processing of emotional words in a group of adolescents with PTSD with childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and childhood physical abuse (CPA) compared to healthy comparison subjects. The stimuli of the task consisted of nouns from different affective categories: neutral, positive, threatening, and social threatening.

The ERP results revealed an enhanced late positive potential (LPP) response in patients with PTSD. Concerning the P3 component, both groups showed reduced amplitude for positively valenced words. Patients with PTSD exhibited a differential enhanced response to social threatening stimuli as compared to physical threatening words, neutral words, and positive words.

It is suggested that patients with PTSD show a different pattern of information processing concerning negative social stimuli (Klein et al., 2019). Furthermore, it is argued that because of their specific traumatic experiences this group has an elaborated fear network after trauma, and these negative cues might be the most relevant for the patients with PTSD. There was found a blunted cardiac response in patients with PTSD compared to healthy comparison subjects for physical stimuli that were threatening. No differences were found in healthy comparison subjects (Klein et al., 2019).