Personalized Emotional Contexts in Inhibitory Control Training for Trauma-Exposed Individuals

Abstract

Roughly 50% of individuals experience at least one traumatic event in the course of their lives. However, not all individuals with a history of trauma develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). To understand the reasons for this discrepancy, we need to study the mechanisms that relate to the risks and maintenance of PTSD. Emerging evidence has shown that PTSD patients are characterized by a reduction in their ability to disengage from unwanted arousing stimuli, suggesting a deficit in their inhibitory control (IC). Previous research suggests that combining IC-demanding task trials with the processing of negative emotions can improve IC effectiveness in these contexts; however, results from a study by this author showed limited generalization of the IC training effect to new stimuli (i.e., near-transfer). Investigating the explanations of this null finding, the authors found that participants who showed greater emotional reactivity, as evidenced by increased late positive potential (LPP) amplitude, to the emotional context of the IC training (i.e., emotional generic faces), exhibited a greater near-transfer effect, as measured by a reduction in the IC-sensitive event-related potential (ERP) component called the N2. The current study aimed to enhance our previous research by introducing an additional condition in which the IC training occurs within a context specifically designed to heighten emotional reactivity in a trauma-exposed sample. We achieved this by tailoring the contextual stimuli to align with the participants' index trauma, in a sample of trauma-exposed adult females with elevated post-traumatic stress symptoms. Results showed that, similar to our previous findings, the IC-emotion association was established during the training blocks but did not generalize to novel stimuli. Moreover, the specific nature of the emotional stimuli did not seem to influence this training effect. We conclude that although the IC training in an emotional context can improve IC outcomes for the trained emotion, the training effect does not transfer to new stimuli, regardless of the emotional salience of the context.