A Review of fMRI Affective Processing Paradigms Used in the Neurobiological Study of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Posttraumatic stress disorder is a chronic and debilitating psychiatric disorder with a complex clinical presentation. The last two decades have seen a proliferation of literature on the neurobiological mechanisms subserving affective processing in posttraumatic stress disorder. The current review will summarize the neuroimaging results of the most common experimental designs used to elucidate the affective signature of posttraumatic stress disorder. From this summary, we will provide a heuristic to organize the various paradigms discussed and report neural patterns of activations using this heuristic as a framework. Next, we will compare these results to the traditional functional neurocircuitry model of posttraumatic stress disorder and discuss biological and analytic variables which may account for the heterogeneity within this literature. We hope that this approach may elucidate the role of experimental parameters in influencing neuroimaging findings.