Post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic hyperconnectivity in emotional processing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with heightened responses to threatening stimuli, particularly aggression-related emotional facial expressions. The stability over time of this neurophysiological 'hyperactive' threat response has not been determined. We studied implicit emotional face processing in soldiers with and without PTSD at two time-points (roughly 2 years apart) using magnetoencephalography to determine the response of oscillations and synchrony to happy and angry faces, and the reliability of this marker for PTSD over time. At the initial time-point we had 20 soldiers with and 25 without PTSD; 35 returned for follow-up testing 2 years later, and included 13 with and 22 without PTSD. A mixed-effects analysis was used. There were no significant differences (albeit a slight reduction) in the severity of PTSD between the two time-points. MEG contrasts of the neurophysiological networks involved in the processing of angry vs. happy faces showed that the PTSD group had elevated oscillatory connectivity for angry faces. Maladaptive hypersynchrony in PTSD for threatening faces was seen in subcortical regions, including the thalamus, as well as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, cingulum gyri, inferior temporal and parietal regions. These results are generally consistent with prior studies and our own, and we demonstrate that this hyperconnectivity was stable over a two year period, in line with essentially stable symptomatology. Together, these results are consistent with the theory that hypervigilance in PTSD is driven by bottom-up, rapid processing of threat-related stimuli that engage a widespread network working in synchrony.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".