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 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. This study enrolled typically developing (TD, N=42) and trauma-exposed (TE, N=45) parent-child dyads, where youth were classified as having low (TE+LowPTSS) or high (TE+HighPTSS) posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Dyads completed acquisition (Day 1), direct and vicarious extinction by watching a video of parent direct (Day 2), and extinction recall (Day 3). Youth completed all phases during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Analysis of behavioral outcomes, parent-child autonomic synchrony, and whole-brain voxelwise activation were used to characterize trauma- and PTSS-related correlates of vicarious extinction. Autonomic synchrony analyses suggest that trauma-exposed youth do not exhibit normative vicarious extinction transmission, where stronger autonomic synchrony with their parent did not result in lower arousal. Next, TE+HighPTSS youth uniquely exhibited less successful behavioral learning and atypically high arousal to safety cues during vicarious extinction, as compared to TE+LowPTSS and TD youth. Brain activation analyses revealed that patterns of ventral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex recruitment differentiates PTSS load during vicarious extinction. 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.
Heyn et al. (Sun,) studied this question.