Considering PTSD from the perspective of brain processes: A psychological construction approach

Abstract

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a complex psychiatric disorder that involves symptoms from various domains that appear to be produced by the combination of several mechanisms. The authors contend that existing neural accounts fail to provide a viable model that explains the emergence and maintenance of PTSD and the associated heterogeneity in the expression of this disorder (cf. Garfinkel & Liberzon, 2009). They introduce a psychological construction approach as a novel framework to probe the brain basis of PTSD, where distributed networks within the human brain are thought to correspond to the basic psychological ingredients of the mind. The authors posit that it is the combination of these ingredients that produces the heterogeneous symptom clusters in PTSD. Their goal is show that a constructionist approach has significant heuristic value in understanding the emergence and maintenance of PTSD symptoms, and leads to different and perhaps more useful conjectures about the origins and maintenance of the syndrome than the traditional hyperreactive fear account.

Comorbidity of personality disorders in anxiety disorders: A meta-analysis of 30 years of research

“…Clearly, PTSD stands out as clinically more heterogeneous in nature compared with the other ADs. This is in line with other research pointing out the considerable heterogeneous clinical picture characterizing this patient group (Suvak and Barrett, 2011). Moreover, the heterogeneity may be explained…”

Uncertainty and anticipation in anxiety: an integrated neurobiological and psychological perspective

“…Adaptive responses to uncertainty require flexible coordination among these different processes, and alterations to any region would have consequences for functions of additional regions, particularly given the heavy reciprocal structural connections and functional co-activation of many of the regions described here 4,87,88,126,177,178 . Assessment of the functional and structural integrity of these networks is likely to provide a more informative picture of anxious pathology than the measurement of any one region in isolation 179–181 .…”

Executive Dysfunctions: The Role in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity and Post-traumatic Stress Neuropsychiatric Disorders

“…The repercussions are evident in the set of clinical symptoms of the disorder (Suvak and Barrett, 2011). Affectations of anatomical and functional natures have been identified in the neurocircuits, especially in the medial PFC, hippocampus, and amygdala (Shin et al, 2006; Herringa et al, 2012).…”

“…Knowledge of the genetic basis and neural pathways involved in the etiology and maintenance of the disorder allow better understanding from a clinical perspective (Suvak and Barrett, 2011; Pitman et al, 2012; Skelton et al, 2012). …”