The Impact of Error-Related Brain Activity and Parental Attachment on Youth Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms

Exposure to traumatic events is common in youth and associated with acute and sustained posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Theory suggests that exaggerated threat sensitivity contributes to greater PTSS severity, and emerging work points to parental attachment as a potential moderator of the association between threat sensitivity and PTSS, although no study has directly tested this hypothesis. The aim of the current study is to examine the unique and interactive effects of neurobiological threat sensitivity and parental attachment on PTSS severity in trauma-exposed youths. A total of 174 participants 16-19 years old completed self-report questionnaires assessing parental attachment and PTSS severity and a well-validated modified flanker task designed to probe the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related potential that reflects individual differences in threat sensitivity. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a series of hierarchical linear regression analyses. Separate models were run for each PTSS cluster, with age and sex as covariates. As expected, low parental attachment was associated with increased PTSS severity across all clusters. There were no main effects of ERN amplitude. However, a significant ERN × parental attachment interaction emerged for two clusters-intrusions (B) and avoidance (C). At low levels of parental attachment only, more negative ERN amplitude was associated with increased intrusions and avoidance symptoms. These findings suggest that neurobiological threat sensitivity and parental attachment may interact to influence specific PTSS symptoms in trauma-exposed youth.