Tracing the Legacy of Trauma on Brain and Behaviour

This thesis investigates how psychological trauma shapes psychopathology and neurobiology. We show that sexual trauma heightens select rather than diffuse maladaptive traits with one just exposure, while interpersonal physical violence follows dose–response patterns shaped by sex and developmental timing for these select traits. A second study compares 90 rs-fMRI preprocessing pipelines, revealing trade-offs between denoising and behavioural prediction. The final study integrates prior findings, showing that trauma-associated psychopathology risk is not explained by trauma-associated neurobiological changes. Together, findings clarify the effects of trauma, advance neuroimaging methods, and challenge assumptions concerning the role of the brain in trauma-related psychopathology.