Resilience to trauma: Just a matter of control?

Functional neuroimaging of resilience to trauma: convergent evidence and challenges for future research

Resilience is broadly defined as the ability to adapt successfully following stressful life events. Here, we review functional MRI studies that investigated key psychological factors that have been consistently linked to resilience to severe adversity and trauma exposure. These domains include emotion regulation (including cognitive reappraisal), reward responsivity, and cognitive control. Further, we briefly review functional imaging evidence related to emerging areas of study that may potentially facilitate resilience: namely social cognition, active coping, and successful fear extinction. Finally, we also touch upon ongoing issues in neuroimaging study design that will need to be addressed to enable us to harness insight from such studies to improve treatments for - or, ideally, guard against the development of - debilitating post-traumatic stress syndromes.

Long-term modulation of cardiac activity induced by inhibitory control over emotional memories

Efforts to exclude past experiences from conscious awareness can lead to forgetting. Memory suppression is central to affective disorders, but we still do not really know whether emotions, including their physiological causes, are also impacted by this process in normal functioning individuals. In two studies, we measured the after-effects of suppressing negative memories on cardiac response in healthy participants. Results of Study 1 revealed that efficient control of memories was associated with long-term inhibition of the cardiac deceleration that is normally induced by disgusting stimuli. Attempts to suppress sad memories, by contrast, aggravated the cardiac response, an effect that was closely related to the inability to forget this specific material. In Study 2, electroencephalography revealed a reduction in power in the theta (3-8 Hz), alpha (8-12 Hz) and low-beta (13-20 Hz) bands during the suppression of unwanted memories, compared with their voluntary recall. Interestingly, however, the reduction of power in the theta frequency band during memory control was related to a subsequent inhibition of the cardiac response. These results provide a neurophysiological basis for the influence of memory control mechanisms on the cardiac system, opening up new avenues and questions for treating intrusive memories using motivated forgetting.