Despite broad evidence suggesting that adversity-exposed youth experience an impaired ability to recognize emotion in others, the underlying biological mechanisms remains elusive. This study uses a multimethod approach to target the neurological substrates of this phenomenon in a well-phenotyped sample of youth meeting diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Twenty-one PTSD-afflicted youth and 23 typically developing (TD) controls completed clinical interview schedules, an emotion recognition task with eye-tracking, and an implicit emotion processing task during functional magnetic resonance imaging )fMRI). PTSD was associated with decreased accuracy in identification of angry, disgust, and neutral faces as compared to TD youth. Of note, these impairments occurred despite the normal deployment of visual attention in youth with PTSD relative to TD youth. Correlation with a related fMRI task revealed a group by accuracy interaction for amygdala–hippocampus functional connectivity (FC) for angry expressions, where TD youth showed a positive relationship between anger accuracy and amygdala–hippocampus FC; this relationship was reversed in youth with PTSD. These findings are a novel characterization of impaired threat recognition within a well-phenotyped population of severe pediatric PTSD. Further, the differential amygdala–hippocampus FC identified in youth with PTSD may imply aberrant efficiency of emotional contextualization circuits.

尽管有大量证据表明，遭受逆境的青少年识别他人情绪的能力受损，但其潜在的生物学机制仍然难以捉摸。这项研究采用多种方法，在符合创伤后应激障碍 (PTSD) 诊断标准的表型良好的青少年样本中，针对这种现象的神经学基础。21 名患有 PTSD 的青少年和 23 名典型发育 (TD) 对照者完成了临床访谈计划、通过眼动追踪进行的情绪识别任务以及功能性磁共振成像 (fMRI) 期间的隐式情绪处理任务。与 TD 青少年相比，PTSD 与识别愤怒、厌恶和中性面孔的准确性下降有关。值得注意的是，尽管与 TD 青少年相比，患有 PTSD 的青少年的视觉注意力正常部署，但这些损害还是发生了。与相关功能磁共振成像任务的相关性揭示了一组通过对愤怒表达的杏仁核-海马功能连接（FC）的准确性相互作用进行的分组，其中TD青少年表现出愤怒准确性与杏仁核-海马FC之间的正相关关系；在患有创伤后应激障碍 (PTSD) 的青少年中，这种关系发生了逆转。这些发现是表型良好的严重儿科创伤后应激障碍人群中威胁识别受损的新特征。此外，在患有 PTSD 的青少年中发现的杏仁核-海马 FC 的差异可能意味着情绪情境化回路的效率异常。