Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) emerges after the exposure to an event that elicits horror or helplessness, including threat of injury or death to one's self or another person. Community-based studies have evaluated its occurrence with a lifetime prevalence of 9.2% in the Canadian population. This research project aims to develop innovative, neural-substrate based, and novel theoretical paradigms for understanding psychological trauma and its clinical outcomes, including problems in emotion regulation, self-awareness, social emotional and self-referential processing.