Neurobiological Signatures of Dyadic Transmission of Fear Extinction in Adolescent Trauma Exposure and Posttraumatic Stress.

Background: The use of social cues to attenuate prior learned fear associations is a critical skill for normative development. Impairments in extinction learning underlie emerging models of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults. However, few have investigated how trauma and/or related psychopathology may impact the unique neural and physiological processes of observed-parent vicarious safety learning during adolescence. Methods: This study enrolled typically developing (TD) ( Results: Autonomic synchrony analyses suggest that TE youths did not exhibit normative vicarious extinction transmission, where stronger autonomic synchrony with their parent did not result in lower arousal. Next, TE+high youths uniquely exhibited less successful behavioral learning and atypically high arousal in response to safety cues during vicarious extinction as compared with TE+low and TD youths. Brain activation analyses revealed that patterns of ventral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) recruitment differentiated PTSS load during vicarious extinction. Conclusions: This study identifies novel behavioral and neurobiological profiles of trauma and PTSD. Distinct behavioral impairments in vicarious learning may be related to disruptions in parent-child synchrony or altered recruitment of the lateral PFC during vicarious learning encoding.