Neural correlates of automatic perceptual sensitivity to facial affect in posttraumatic stress disorder subjects who survived L’Aquila eartquake of april 6, 2009

""The “Emotional Numbing” (EN), constitutes one of the core symptoms in PTSD and its exact. nature remains elusive. This disorder shows an abnormal response of cortical and limbic regions which are normally involved in understanding emotions since the very earliest stages of the. development of processing ability. The aim of our study was to examine automatic perceptual. sensitivity to facial affect in PTSD, through an affective priming task administered during. functional magnetic resonance (fMRI).Ten physically healthy subjects with PTSD, diagnosed. according to DSM-IV-TR, who survived L’Aquila earthquake of April 6, 2009, and 10 healthy. controls matching for age, sex and education participated to the study.. Behavioral data revealed in PTSD-group a higher sensitivity to negative facial affect on an. automatic processing level. FMRI data analysis revealed that PTSD-subjects showed a significantly. higher activation in right insula and left amygdala which was not present in healthy subjects; on the. contrary, healthy controls showed a greater activation of left lingual gyrus. Data support the. hypothesis that PTSD appears to be sensitive to negative affect on an automatic processing level. and correlated with the activation of specific areas involved in processing emotions. Elevated. activation of these areas may underlie of emotion dysregulation in PTSD and could explain the. symptom "emotional numbing" symptom associated with PTSD.. The present study suffer of a number of limitations such as a the relatively small sample size did not. allow the application of alternative statistical models.. ""