ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2023
'I am afraid you will see the stain on my soul': Direct gaze neural processing in individuals with PTSD after moral injury recall.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Resting-State Neural Signatures of Moral Injury: Associations With Rumination.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2026Article
- The impact of moral injury-related content on reasoning and its neural correlates: Data from the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF).Neuroimage. Reports · 2026Article
- Toward a framework of moral challenges in military operations: implications for psychological resilience.Frontiers in public health · 2026Review
- Unraveling trauma memory: Differential functional connectivity profiles of anterior and posterior hippocampus in post-traumatic stress disorder and its dissociative subtype.Neuroimage. Reports · 2025Article
- Canadian Armed Forces Veterans' Perspectives on the Effects of Exposure to Children in Armed Conflict During Military Service: Protocol for a Qualitative Study.JMIR research protocols · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Direct eye contact is essential to understanding others' thoughts and feelings in social interactions. However, those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and exposure to moral injury (MI) may exhibit altered theory-of-mind (ToM)/mentalizing processes and experience shame which precludes one's capacity for direct eye contact. We investigated blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) responses associated with direct vs averted gaze using a virtual reality paradigm in individuals with PTSD (n = 28) relative to healthy controls (n = 18) following recall of a MI vs a neutral memory. Associations between BOLD responses and clinical symptomatology were also assessed. After MI recall, individuals with PTSD showed greater activation in the right temporoparietal junction as compared to controls (T = 4.83; pFDR < 0.001; k = 237) during direct gaze. No significant activation occurred during direct gaze after neutral memory recall. Further, a significant positive correlation was found between feelings of distress and right medial superior frontal gyrus activation in individuals with PTSD (T = 5.03; pFDR = 0.049; k = 123). These findings suggest that direct gaze after MI recall prompts compensatory ToM/mentalizing processing. Implications for future interventions aimed at mitigating the effects of PTSD on social functioning are discussed.
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