‘I am afraid you will see the stain on my soul’: Direct gaze neural processing in individuals with PTSD after moral injury recall
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Direct eye contact is essential to understanding others' thoughts and feelings in social interactions. However, those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and exposure to moral injury (MI) may exhibit altered theory-of-mind (ToM)/mentalizing processes and experience shame which precludes one's capacity for direct eye contact. We investigated blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) responses associated with direct vs averted gaze using a virtual reality paradigm in individuals with PTSD (n = 28) relative to healthy controls (n = 18) following recall of a MI vs a neutral memory. Associations between BOLD responses and clinical symptomatology were also assessed. After MI recall, individuals with PTSD showed greater activation in the right temporoparietal junction as compared to controls (T = 4.83; pFDR < 0.001; k = 237) during direct gaze. No significant activation occurred during direct gaze after neutral memory recall. Further, a significant positive correlation was found between feelings of distress and right medial superior frontal gyrus activation in individuals with PTSD (T = 5.03; pFDR = 0.049; k = 123). These findings suggest that direct gaze after MI recall prompts compensatory ToM/mentalizing processing. Implications for future interventions aimed at mitigating the effects of PTSD on social functioning are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".