Oliver Katelyn I, Stenson Anais, van Rooij Sanne J H, Johnson Colin B, Ely Timothy D, Powers Abigail, Minton Sean T, Wiltshire Charis, Kim Ye Ji, Hinrichs Rebecca, Jovanovic Tanja, Stevens Jennifer S
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA.
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA.
Dev Psychopathol. 2024 Oct 29:1-12. doi: 10.1017/S0954579424001718.
Similar to adults with posttraumatic stress disorder, children with early life adversity show bias in memory for negative emotional stimuli. However, it is not well understood how childhood adversity impacts mechanisms underlying emotional memory. = 56 children (8-14 years, 48% female) reported on adverse experiences including potentially traumatic events and underwent fMRI while attending to emotionally pleasant, neutral, or negative images. Post-scan, participants completed a cued recall test to assess memory for these images. Emotional difference-in-memory (DM) scores were computed by subtracting negative or positive from neutral recall performance. All children showed enhancing effects of emotion on recall, with no effect of trauma load. However, children with less trauma showed a larger emotional DM for both positive and negative stimuli when amygdala or anterior hippocampal activity was higher. In contrast, highly trauma-exposed children demonstrated a lower emotional DM with greater amygdala or hippocampal activity. This suggested that alternative neural mechanisms might support emotional enhancement of encoding in children with greater trauma load. Whole-brain analyses revealed that right fusiform activity during encoding positively correlated with both trauma load and successful later recall of positive images. Therefore, highly trauma-exposed children may use alternative, potentially adaptive neural pathways via the ventral visual stream to encode positive emotional events.
与患有创伤后应激障碍的成年人相似，经历过早期生活逆境的儿童在对负面情绪刺激的记忆方面表现出偏差。然而，童年逆境如何影响情绪记忆的潜在机制尚不清楚。56名儿童（8至14岁，48%为女性）报告了包括潜在创伤性事件在内的不良经历，并在观看情绪愉悦、中性或负面图像时接受了功能磁共振成像检查。扫描后，参与者完成了一项线索回忆测试，以评估对这些图像的记忆。情绪记忆差异（DM）分数通过从中性回忆表现中减去负面或正面回忆表现来计算。所有儿童都表现出情绪对回忆的增强作用，而创伤负荷没有影响。然而，当杏仁核或前海马体活动较高时，创伤较少的儿童对正面和负面刺激都表现出更大的情绪DM。相比之下，高创伤暴露儿童在杏仁核或海马体活动增强时表现出较低的情绪DM。这表明，替代的神经机制可能支持创伤负荷较大的儿童编码过程中的情绪增强。全脑分析显示，编码过程中右侧梭状回的活动与创伤负荷以及随后对正面图像的成功回忆均呈正相关。因此，高创伤暴露儿童可能通过腹侧视觉通路使用替代的、潜在适应性的神经通路来编码积极情绪事件。
