Schedule of Events | Symposia

Prefrontal fNIRS-based cortical activity patterns differ during negative emotional recall in young adults with complex PTSD

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Prisha Goyal¹ (prishagoyal2@my.unt.edu), Anthony Ryals¹, Steph Camacho¹, Diana Towe¹; ¹University of North Texas

Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD) is a neuropsychiatric disorder resulting from prolonged/chronic trauma exposure leading to nuanced symptoms distinguishing it from PTSD. Despite its prominence in modern society, cPTSD remains unrecognized in the DSM-5, leaving the disorder to be critically under-researched. In the present study, N=27 young adult participants completed tasks coupled with fNIRS recording to assess cortical blood flow patterns in the frontal lobe. Seven individuals were excluded for scoring near the middle of the Complex Trauma Inventory (CTI) and motion-artifacts. The CTI, a newly developed and validated screener, differentiated 10 individuals exhibiting high cPTSD symptoms from a control group of 10 exhibiting low to no cPTSD symptoms. Participants then completed cognitive assessments relating to inhibition, working memory, and a novel emotional short-term recall task. Results indicate the cPTSD population exhibited significantly higher scores of depression and anxiety in comparison to the healthy control group. Additionally, the cPTSD group performed significantly better than the healthy controls on the positive and negative emotional recall. We observed a significantly higher level of oxygenated hemoglobin in a two-channel optode cluster corresponding with Brodmann Areas 45 and 47 in the right hemisphere for the cPTSD group compared to controls during the negative emotional working memory task. These initial results suggest that individuals reporting cPTSD symptoms may recruit additional cognitive resources to perform negatively charged memory tasks, which may reflect enhanced recruitment of prefrontally-mediated resources devoted to higher attention to (or enhanced attempted inhibitory control of) negatively-valenced memory information in short-term recall.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions