Psychophysiologic reactivity, subjective distress, and their associations with PTSD diagnosis.

Abstract

Intense subjective distress and physiologic reactivity upon exposure to reminders of the traumatic event are each diagnostic features of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, subjective reports and psychophysiological data often suggest different conclusions. For the present study, we combined data from five previous studies to assess the contributions of these two types of measures in predicting PTSD diagnosis. One hundred fifty trauma-exposed participants who were classified into PTSD or non-PTSD groups based on structured diagnostic interviews completed the same script-driven imagery procedure, which quantified measures of psychophysiologic reactivity and self-reported emotional responses. We derived four discriminant functions (DiscFxs) that each maximally separated the PTSD from the non-PTSD group using (1) psychophysiologic measures recorded during personal mental imagery of the traumatic event; (2) self-report ratings in response to the trauma imagery; (3) psychophysiologic measures recorded during personal mental imagery of another highly stressful experience unrelated to the index traumatic event; and (4) self-report ratings in response to this other stressor. When PTSD status was simultaneously regressed on all four DiscFxs, trauma-related psychophysiological reactivity was a significant predictor, but physiological reactivity resulting from the highly stressful, but not traumatic script, was not. Self-reported distress to the traumatic experience and the other stressful event were both predictive of PTSD diagnosis. Trauma-related psychophysiologic reactivity was the best predictor of PTSD diagnosis, but self-reported distress contributed additional variance. These results are discussed in relation to the Research Domain Criteria framework.

Six Years of Research on the National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Initiative: A Systematic Review

“…This was taken to suggest that physiological reactivity is a stable and valid measure of disturbances in the Acute Threat construct associated with PTSD. Furthermore, Pineles et al (2013) demonstrated that these physiological measures are a better predictor of PTSD diagnosis than self-report measures of emotional response.…”

Mindful attention regulation and non-judgmental orientation in depression: A multi-method approach

“…Under the assumption that the negative emotional quality of self-criticism could elicit corrugator EMG responses, this lack of correlation is in line with the common observation of low associations between self-reports, physiological responses, and behaviors. (For examples, see Gross & Levenson, 1993;McDonagh-Coyle et al, 2001;Pineles et al, 2013;Pitman et al, 2001. ) Emotions are traditionally measured according to three systems (Lang, 1969): affective reports, physiological reactivity and behavioral acts.…”

Pharmacological blockade of memory reconsolidation in posttraumatic stress disorder: Three negative psychophysiological studies

“…An a priori discriminant function was derived from the HR, SC, and lateral frontalis EMG responses of 92 individuals with PTSD and 86 individuals without PTSD, who had previously been studied using the same script-driven imagery technique. This discriminant function was used to a) derive PTSD cut-off scores (shown in Tables 1-3) and b) calculate each subject's probability of being classified into the physiological PTSD group (Orr et al, 2012;Bauer et al, 2013;Pineles et al, 2013). This physiological PTSD probability score (PPrb) served as a composite measure of overall physiological responding during script-driven traumatic imagery, obviating the need for multivariate analyses of physiological responses in the small samples studied.…”