Angry and Fearful Face Conflict Effects in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Abstract

In the presence of threatening stimuli, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can manifest as hypervigilance for threat and disrupted attentional control. PTSD patients have shown exaggerated interference effects on tasks using trauma-related or threat stimuli. In studies of PTSD, faces with negative expressions are often used as threat stimuli, yet angry and fearful facial expressions may elicit different responses. The modified Eriksen flanker task, or the emotional face flanker, has been used to examine response interference. We compared 23 PTSD patients and 23 military controls on an emotional face flanker task using angry, fearful and neutral expressions. Participants identified the emotion of a central target face flanked by faces with either congruent or incongruent emotions. As expected, both groups showed slower reaction times (RTs) and decreased accuracy on emotional target faces, relative to neutral. Unexpectedly, both groups showed nearly identical interference effects on fearful and neutral target trials. However, post hoc testing suggested that PTSD patients showed faster RTs than controls on congruent angry faces (target and flanker faces both angry) relative to incongruent, although this finding should be interpreted with caution. This possible RT facilitation effect with angry, but not fearful faces, also correlated positively with self-report measures of PTSD symptoms. These results suggest that PTSD patients may be more vigilant for, or primed to respond to, the appearance of angry faces, relative to fearful, but further study is needed.

Neural responses to negative facial emotions: Sex differences in the correlates of individual anger and fear traits

“…Thus, it would appear that fear-prone healthy individuals are able to down-regulate RSC response to face stimuli, limiting the exposure to negative emotions, whereas individuals with PTSD are devoid of this protective mechanism. Indeed, people suffering PTSD showed higher physiological arousal to negative emotional stimuli ( Wolf et al, 2009 ) and faster response in identifying negative facial and other stress-eliciting stimuli ( Ashley and Swick, 2019 ). Thus, other than reflecting individual variation in emotion processing function in neurotypical populations, RSC response to negative emotions may potentially serve as a sex-shared neural marker of the severity of PTSD.…”

Understanding Brain Mechanisms of Reactive Aggression

“…In experimental studies, the threat circuitry is typically stimulated using pictures of fearful or angry faces. By communicating hostility, angry faces are used as a direct proxy for social threat [25], while fearful faces evoke attentional monitoring of a threatening environment and thus ambiguous threat [26]. In a large study in 10-12-year-old boys, the tendency to respond to ambiguous social scenes with hostility attribution and reactive aggression predicted participants' amygdala response to fearful faces in an emotional face matching task in young adulthood [27•].…”

Posttraumatic Stress and Perceived Interpersonal Provocation in Adolescents

“…Clinical levels of PTS seem to be important in the expression of aggression and gender-specific reactions to peer provocation. Results indicate that some differences in reactions to peer provocation in the wake of traumatic exposure may be attributable to gender-specific mechanisms ( Ashley & Swick, 2019 ) and suggest that PTS may be correlated with more aggressive behavioral tendencies ( Zhan et al, 2017 ), as well as with hostile attributional styles ( Tull et al, 2007 ). Our findings may help explain the heterogeneity of the gender-related differences in conflict situations in connection with PTS ( Chen et al., 2012 ) and facilitate the development of gender-specific intervention strategies.…”