Journal of Emergency Health Care

fa The Neurobiology of Acute Emotional Dysregulation in Emergency Trauma Care: A Psychophysiological Perspective عمومى General پژوهشي Research Frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) is an electroencephalographic marker that reflects approach-avoidance motivation in the brain. In this review, we consolidate divergent findings on FAA from studies on people with PTSD, individuals with trauma exposure but no PTSD diagnosis (trauma-exposed healthy controls), and people with no significant trauma history (non-trauma healthy controls). FAA has been examined during tasks combining emotional stimuli (threatening and neutral images) with cognitive demands such as distraction or working memory load. Notably, PTSD is associated with increased left frontal activity (linked to approach motivation) in response to threatening images when cognitive demands are low. The trauma-exposed individuals without PTSD group shows a similar but attenuated pattern. In contrast, NTHC tends to show right frontal activity (associated with withdrawal tendencies) regardless of stimulus type. Interestingly, this right-lateralized pattern—which is absent in the PTSD group—tends to disappear under higher cognitive load, such as when filtering out distractions. Under these conditions, the PTSD group maintains a left frontal bias even for neutral stimuli, while the other two groups either reduce left-sided activity or maintain a balanced pattern. Overall, these findings suggest that PTSD alters the typical response to threat and impairs emotion regulation under cognitive strain. Simply having a trauma history may produce a milder form of this approach bias without meeting criteria for full disorder. We discuss implications for prefrontal threat processing and the potential of neurofeedback to retrain these patterns.   Emotional Dysregulation, Trauma, Psychophysiology, Heart Rate Variability, Skin Conductance, Emergency Care, PTSD, Autonomic Nervous System, Intervention 0 0 http://intjmi.com/browse.php?a_code=A-10-1-700&slc_lang=fa&sid=1 Mojtaba Khaksarian 10031947532846008439 10031947532846008439 Yes Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Lorestan University of Medical Sciences, Khorramabad, Iran Azita Keshavarz 10031947532846008440 10031947532846008440 No Department of Psychology, Torbat-e Jam Branch, Islamic Azad University, Torbat-e Jam, Iran Hamid Ahmadi 10031947532846008441 10031947532846008441 No Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Lorestan University of Medical Sciences, Khorramabad, Iran