Nazarov A, Frewen P, Oremus C, Schellenberg E G, McKinnon M C, Lanius R
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada; Mood Disorders Program, St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2015 May;131(5):342-9. doi: 10.1111/acps.12364. Epub 2014 Nov 17.
Although deficits in memory and cognitive processing are evident in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), difficulties with social cognition and the impact of such difficulties on interpersonal functioning are poorly understood. Here, we examined the ability of women diagnosed with PTSD related to childhood abuse to discriminate affective prosody, a central component of social cognition.
Women with PTSD and healthy controls (HCs) completed two computer-based tasks assessing affective prosody: (i) recognition (categorizing foreign-language excerpts as angry, fearful, sad, or happy) and (ii) discrimination (identifying whether two excerpts played consecutively had the 'same' or 'different' emotion). The association of performance with symptom presentation, trauma history, and interpersonal functioning was also explored.
Women with PTSD were slower than HCs at identifying happiness, sadness, and fear, but not anger in the speech excerpts. The presence of dissociative symptoms was related to reduced accuracy on the discrimination task. An increased severity of childhood trauma was associated with reduced accuracy on the discrimination task and with slower identification of emotional prosody.
Exposure to childhood trauma is associated with long-term, atypical development in the interpretation of prosodic cues in speech. The findings have implications for the intergenerational transmission of trauma.
尽管创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）患者存在明显的记忆和认知加工缺陷，但人们对其社会认知困难以及这些困难对人际功能的影响了解甚少。在此，我们研究了被诊断为与童年虐待相关的创伤后应激障碍的女性辨别情感韵律（社会认知的核心组成部分）的能力。
患有创伤后应激障碍的女性和健康对照者（HCs）完成了两项基于计算机的评估情感韵律的任务：（i）识别（将外语摘录分类为愤怒、恐惧、悲伤或快乐）和（ii）辨别（确定连续播放的两段摘录是否具有“相同”或“不同”的情绪）。还探讨了表现与症状表现、创伤史和人际功能之间的关联。
患有创伤后应激障碍的女性在识别语音摘录中的快乐、悲伤和恐惧方面比健康对照者慢，但在识别愤怒方面则不然。分离症状的存在与辨别任务的准确性降低有关。童年创伤严重程度的增加与辨别任务的准确性降低以及情感韵律识别速度减慢有关。
童年创伤暴露与言语韵律线索解读的长期非典型发展有关。这些发现对创伤的代际传递具有启示意义。
