Psychometric properties of the late positive potential in combat-exposed veterans.

Trauma exposure is prevalent, associated with multiple forms of psychopathology, and thought to alter the neurobiological substrates of threat processing. The late positive potential (LPP) is an event-related potential (ERP) that may be a clinically useful probe of the neurobiology of threat processing. Despite evidence that combat-exposed veterans exhibit aberrant threat modulation of the LPP, no studies to date have tested the psychometric properties of the LPP in combat trauma-exposed, symptomatic veterans.

Nonlinear relations between post-traumatic stress symptoms and electrocortical reactivity during emotional face processing in combat-exposed veterans.

Combat-related post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) are prevalent among recently deployed veterans, making identification of biomarkers of PTSS in this population a public health priority. Given the link between threat processing neurobiology and PTSS, the threat-related late positive potential (LPP), an ERP reflective of attentional processing sensitive to emotion and its regulation, may have utility as a cost-effective biomarker. Existing PTSS/threat-related LPP findings are mixed, possibly due to variability in PTSS across samples, but this has never been explicitly tested.