What is it about?
How does trauma in the past change the way the brain responds to stress in the future? There are two major ideas: one, that past stress leads people to be more sensitive to future stress, and the other, that past stress leads people to react less to future stress. We found that certain brain networks track how many stressful events people experienced in the past, and show that when people encounter new stress in the lab, these networks show lower connectivity. This response is adaptive, as people who show this decrease are also less depressed.
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Why is it important?
Understanding how to adaptively cope with stress, and how someone's past can change their responses to stress in the future, is important both clinically and in everyday life. What makes this study different is that we show how the brain responds to stress both in the past and in the moment: past stress is associated with differences in brain patterns, and that adapting to stress in the moment can change these same patterns.
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This page is a summary of: Trauma-predictive brain network connectivity adaptively responds to mild acute stress, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2505965122.
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