Psychological and Neurobiological Bases of Threat Processing in Victims of Pandemics and Natural Disasters
A special issue of Trauma Care (ISSN 2673-866X).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2025 | Viewed by 11209
Special Issue Editors
Interests: spatial cognition, mental imagery and motor simulation in children and adults with typical and atypical development; neuropsychology of anxiety and hypervigilance to threat
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: emotion-cognition interactions, interoception, emotion processing, defensive responses, and cognitive biases from the lens of cognitive and clinical neuroscience
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Individuals exposed to traumatic events, such as natural disasters, can develop different emotional disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and social phobia. Moreover, a certain percentage of the exposed individuals can develop subtle emotional changes that do not reach clinical significance. Although these individuals could be considered the most resilient ones, they are more prone to mental health problems and chronic illnesses later in life. These responses to trauma do not necessarily imply the impaired processing of emotions but rather seem to represent an increased sensitivity towards specific emotional signals, in particular, those signals conveying self-relevant potential threatening information. Analogously to natural disasters, the biological ones, such as the COVID‐19 pandemic, increase the appearance of emotional distress and psychopathology. In particular, healthcare professionals are highly exposed to the risk of developing psychopathological conditions. For this reason, efforts in the detection of the early signs of dysfunctional emotional changes in at-risk populations are of primary relevance for dealing with the psychological crisis due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. From this perspective, shedding light on the neural and psychological mechanisms involved in the responses to trauma exposure in both clinical and nonclinical populations is crucial for developing tailored preventive and treatment interventions.
Dr. Massimiliano Conson
Dr. Laura Sagliano
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- natural disasters
- earthquake
- biological threat
- attentional bias
- vigilance to threat
- psychopathology
- emotional faces
- mental health
- fear of contagion
- health anxiety
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