ArticleNeurobiology of stress2021
Dissociable impact of childhood trauma and deployment trauma on affective modulation of startle.
Article in Neurobiology of stress, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 16 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- The effect of ketamine on affective modulation of the startle reflex and its resting-state brain correlates.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- Single prolonged stress in mice: interactions between alcohol drinking, negative affect, and fear learning.Psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Effect of Traumatic Brain Injury on Sensorimotor Gating.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Person-centered analyses reveal that developmental adversity at moderate levels and neural threat/safety discrimination are associated with lower anxiety in early adulthood.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Can I Leave the Past Behind? Associations between Childhood Abuse and Adult Psychopathology.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Deriving psychiatric symptom-based biomarkers from multivariate relationships between psychophysiological and biochemical measures.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Article
- Age- and sex-specific effects of maternal separation on the acoustic startle reflex in rats: early baseline enhancement in females and blunted response to ambiguous threat.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Trauma disorders are often associated with alterations in aversive anticipation and disruptions in emotion/fear circuits. Heightened or blunted anticipatory responding to negative cues in adulthood may be due to differential trauma exposure during development, and previous trauma exposure in childhood may also modify effects of subsequent trauma in adulthood. The aim of the current investigation was to examine the contributions of childhood trauma on affective modulation of startle before and after trauma exposure in adulthood (a combat deployment). Adult male participants from the Marine Resilience Study with (n = 1145) and without (n = 1312) a history of reported childhood trauma completed an affective modulation of startle task to assess aversive anticipation. Affective startle response was operationalized by electromyography (EMG) recording of the orbicularis oculi muscle in response to acoustic stimuli when anticipating positive and negative affective images. Startle responses to affective images were also assessed. Testing occurred over three time-points; before going on a 7 month combat deployment and 3 and 6 months after returning from deployment. Startle response when anticipating negative images was greater compared to pleasant images across all three test periods. Across all 3 time points, childhood trauma was consistently associated with significantly blunted startle when anticipating negative images, suggesting reliable effects of childhood trauma on aversive anticipation. Conversely, deployment trauma was associated with increased startle reactivity post-deployment compared to pre-deployment, which was independent of childhood trauma and image valence. These results support the hypothesis that trauma exposure during development vs. adulthood may have dissociable effects on aversive anticipation and arousal mechanisms. Further study in women and across more refined age groups is needed to test generalizability and identify potential developmental windows for these differential effects.
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