ArticleNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2022
Emotional numbing in PTSD is associated with lower amygdala reactivity to pain.
Article in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Severe PTSD symptoms magnify episodic memory-encoding deficits and amygdala-ACC attenuation during unpredictable threat in male combat veterans.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Frequency of bullying modulates amygdala response during social exclusion in participants with non-suicidal self-injury.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- Sequential decreases in basolateral amygdala response to threat predict failure to recover from PTSD.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Cannabinoid 1 receptor availability in posttraumatic stress disorder: A positron emission tomography study.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Modeling decision-making under uncertainty with qualitative outcomes.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Validation of the Canadian English and French Versions of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale in Quebec Nursing Staff.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Prevalence and influencing factors of occupational burnout among healthcare workers in the Chinese mainland during the late 2022 Omicron COVID-19 outbreak: a multicenter cross-sectional study.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Neuroimaging in post-traumatic stress disorder: a narrative review.Archives of medical science : AMS · 2025Article
- Physiology mechanisms of exercise for PTSD: a narrative review.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Adverse childhood experiences, brain efficiency, and the development of pain symptoms in youth.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2025Article
- Does Trauma Change the Way Individuals with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Deal with Positive Stimuli?Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Amygdala Cannabinoid 1 Receptor, Pain Response, and Emotional Numbing in Trauma-Exposed Individuals.JAMA network open · 2024Article
- Racial Discrimination and Risk for Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms Among Black Youths.JAMA network open · 2024Article
- Emotional State Transitions in Trauma-Exposed Individuals With and Without Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.JAMA network open · 2024Article
- Neural processing of audiovisual and painful analogue trauma and its relationship with subsequent audiovisual and pain intrusions.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2024Article
- A computational model for learning from repeated traumatic experiences under uncertainty.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with altered pain perception, namely increased pain threshold and higher pain response. While pain consists of physiological and affective components, affective components are often overlooked. Similar patterns of increased threshold-high response in PTSD were shown in response to emotional stimuli, i.e., emotional numbing. As both emotional numbing and pain processing are modulated by the amygdala, we aimed to examine whether individuals diagnosed with PTSD show lower amygdala activation to pain compared with combat controls, and whether the amygdala responses to pain correlates with emotional numbing. To do so, two independent samples of veterans (original study: 44 total (20 PTSD); conceptual replication study: 40 total (20 PTSD)) underwent threat conditioning, where a conditioned stimulus (CS+; visual stimulus) was paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US; electric-shock). We contrasted the amygdala activity to the CS + US pairing with the CS+ presented alone and correlated it with emotional numbing severity. In both samples, the PTSD group showed a robust reduction in amygdala reactivity to shock compared to the Combat Controls group. Furthermore, amygdala activation was negatively correlated with emotional numbing severity. These patterns were unique to the amygdala, and did not appear in comparison to a control region, the insula, a pivotal region for the processing of pain. To conclude, amygdala response to pain is lower in individuals with PTSD, and is associated with emotional numbing symptoms. Lower amygdala reactivity to mild pain may contribute to the "all-or-none" reaction to stressful situations often observed in PTSD.
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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.