Observational studyPsychological medicine2013
The neural basis of flashback formation: the impact of viewing trauma.
Observational study in Psychological medicine, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 70 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
70 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 213 citations in OpenAlex.
- Better together: A systematic review of studies combining magnetic resonance imaging with ecological momentary assessment.Social neuroscience · 2024Pooled it
- Effect of sleep manipulations on intrusive memories after exposure to an experimental analogue trauma: A meta-analytic review.Sleep medicine reviews · 2023Pooled it
- Intrusive memories of trauma: A target for research bridging cognitive science and its clinical application.Clinical psychology review · 2019Pooled it
- Low emotional response to traumatic footage is associated with an absence of analogue flashbacks: an individual participant data meta-analysis of 16 trauma film paradigm experiments.Cognition & emotion · 2015Pooled it
- Linking electric field directionality to treatment outcome in OCD: Insights from patient-specific tDCS modeling.Translational psychiatry · 2026Trial
- Reducing intrusive traumatic memories after emergency caesarean section: A proof-of-principle randomized controlled study.Behaviour research and therapy · 2017Trial
- Mental imagery, emotion and psychopathology across child and adolescent development.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2013Trial
- Re-experiencing trauma: Occipital lobe resting-state functional connectivity in posttraumatic stress disorder.Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Severe PTSD symptoms magnify episodic memory-encoding deficits and amygdala-ACC attenuation during unpredictable threat in male combat veterans.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Social Media, Racial Identity, and the Mental Health Consequences of Vicarious Racism among Black Adults.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- A visual cortex origin of trauma memory intrusions: integrated evidence from TMS and fMRI.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Witnessing Trauma in the Modern Era: The Role of Uncensored Media in Mental Health.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Characterisation of intrusive memories and prediction from memory-related genes and cognitive and emotional factors.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Media Exposure and Vicarious Trauma: Italian Adaptation and Validation of the Media Vicarious Traumatization Scale and Its Impact on Young Adults' Mental Health in Relation to Contemporary Armed Conflicts.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2025Article
- Involuntary and voluntary memory retrieval relies on distinct neural representations and oscillatory processes.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- When Childhood Trauma Meets War: Emotional Eating Through the Lens of PTSD.Rambam Maimonides medical journal · 2025Article
- Meaning and resilience in war-affected populations during crisis.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Does the media (also) keep the score? Media-based exposure to the Russian-Ukrainian war and mental health in Portugal.Journal of health psychology · 2024Article
- It matters what you see: Graphic media images of war and terror may amplify distress.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
10 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundPsychological traumatic events, such as war or road traffic accidents, are widespread. A small but significant proportion of survivors develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Distressing, sensory-based involuntary memories of trauma (henceforth 'flashbacks') are the hallmark symptom of PTSD. Understanding the development of flashbacks may aid their prevention. This work is the first to combine the trauma film paradigm (as an experimental analogue for flashback development) with neuroimaging to investigate the neural basis of flashback aetiology. We investigated the hypothesis that involuntary recall of trauma (flashback) is determined during the original event encoding. Method A total of 22 healthy volunteers viewed a traumatic film whilst undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They kept a 1-week diary to record flashbacks to specific film scenes. Using a novel prospective fMRI design, we compared brain activation for those film scenes that subsequently induced flashbacks with both non-traumatic control scenes and scenes with traumatic content that did not elicit flashbacks ('potentials').
resultsEncoding of scenes that later caused flashbacks was associated with widespread increases in activation, including in the amygdala, striatum, rostral anterior cingulate cortex, thalamus and ventral occipital cortex. The left inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral middle temporal gyrus also exhibited increased activation but only relative to 'potentials'. Thus, these latter regions appeared to distinguish between traumatic content that subsequently flashed back and comparable content that did not.
conclusionsResults provide the first prospective evidence that the brain behaves differently whilst experiencing emotional events that will subsequently become involuntary memories - flashbacks. Understanding the neural basis of analogue flashback memory formation may aid the development of treatment interventions for this PTSD feature.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.