What prevents people with post-traumatic stress disorder from making new acquaintances and maintaining old ones? Scientists have found the answer to this question.
People with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) face not only the symptoms of their illness, such as intrusive memories of trauma or insomnia, but also social isolation. The biological reasons for their loneliness were still unclear.
Researchers at Dartmouth College and the Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD have suggested that socialization difficulties in people with PTSD may be related to certain neurocognitive impairments.1.
In particular, with problems with social working memory — the ability to remember and manipulate information about the psychological state of other people, about their personal qualities and relationships with each other.
To test their theory, the researchers conducted an experiment involving 31 patients with PTSD and 21 people who also suffered psychological trauma, which, however, did not lead to the development of PTSD. Most often, it was about physical or sexual abuse in childhood or adulthood, as well as military trauma.
The experiment assessed the work of social working memory and ordinary working memory of the participants.
They were shown a cut of videos describing the characters of the heroes of the series “Orange is the New Black”. To assess social working memory, participants had to make assumptions about the feelings and relationships of the characters on the show based on these characteristics. And to assess normal working memory, they had to arrange the names of the characters in alphabetical order.
As the participants completed the tasks, the researchers monitored changes in the activity of different regions of their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging.
The results showed that participants with PTSD performed significantly worse on social working memory tasks than participants without PTSD.
They have excessive activity in the so-called sleep mode network, a complex network of neural connections between regions of the cerebral cortex that is responsible for social working memory. But the stronger the hyperactivation of this network, the less social connections a person had and the more lonely he felt.
All of this suggests that people with PTSD need significantly more cognitive resources than mentally healthy people to understand the moods, intentions, and relationships of others.
Therefore, in PTSD, communication even with familiar people brings so much nervous tension and stress that a person subconsciously tries to avoid these contacts, the researchers conclude.
3 books on the topic:
1 Published in a magazine