Departmental Colloquium: Szabolcs Kéri

Trauma has no Race and Nation: a Perspective of Clinical Neuroscience

Psychological trauma, an overwhelming experience of various threatening situations during which the survival, safety, and integrity of the self are severely endangered, can occur in various cultural environments. Posttraumatic stress reactions include intensive and prolonged fear and anxiety, detachment from reality, intrusive recollection (nightmares, flashbacks, and aversive memories), avoidance behavior, emotional numbness, depression, and social isolation. These reactions are expressed, interpreted, and treated in a unique way in different cultures. Here, we argue that behind the cultural diversity psychological trauma is associated with uniformly altered basic associative learning processes. By the comparison of trauma-exposed individuals from the Middle East (victims of terrorist attacks and military trauma) and Hungary (the natural disaster of redsludge flood and other civilian traumas), we show that context reversal learning is identically disrupted, together with structural alterations in the hippocampal formation and amygdala. Results from these studies suggest that human suffering related to traumatic experiences shares the same neurocognitive and neuroanatomical bases regardless of culture, race, and ethnicity.