Interpersonal hostility and violence in vietnam combat veterans with chronic posttraumatic stress disorder

Cross-cultural research on facial expression and the developments of methods to measure facial expression are briefly summarized. What has been learned about emotion from this work on the face is then elucidated. Four questions about facial expression and emotion are discussed: What information does an expression typically convey? Can there be emotion without facial expression? Can there be a facial expression of emotion without emotion? How do individuals differ in their facial expressions of emotion?

Studies in nonhuman primates suggest that high levels of cortisol associated with stress have neurotoxic effects on the hippocampus, a brain structure involved in memory. The authors previously showed that patients with combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) had deficits in short-term memory. The purpose of this study was to compare the hippocampal volume of patients with PTSD to that of subjects without psychiatric disorder. Magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure the volume of the hippocampus in 26 Vietnam combat veterans with PTSD and 22 comparison subjects selected to be similar to the patients in age, sex, race, years of education, socioeconomic status, body size, and years of alcohol abuse. The PTSD patients had a statistically significant 8% smaller right hippocampal volume relative to that of the comparison subjects, but there was no difference in the volume of other brain regions (caudate and temporal lobe). Deficits in short-term verbal memory as measured with the Wechsler Memory Scale were associated with smaller right hippocampal volume in the PTSD patients only. These findings are consistent with a smaller right hippocampal volume in PTSD that is associated with functional deficits in verbal memory.