In military service members, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often becomes chronic, with symptoms that significantly interfere with daily life and social functioning. These difficulties pose a major challenge for the rehabilitation and professional reintegration of injured service members. Our protocol describes a study that investigates emotional contagion processes in military personnel with PTSD, in relation to attachment style, along with selected biophysiological and psychosocial factors. The method compares two groups of French military personnel: one group with PTSD (n=41) and a control group without PTSD (n=53). During a single visit, each participant completes four steps: (1) provision of informed consent; (2) saliva collection (for the assay of oxytocin and vasopressin, and for genetic polymorphism analyses); (3) a computer-based emotion recognition task combined with physiological recordings of electrodermal activity and heart rate variability; and (4) completion of a set of validated self-report questionnaires measuring attachment, emotional contagion, empathy, post-traumatic symptoms, stress, adverse childhood experiences, and positive mental health; and a set of sociodemographic questions gathering information on participants’ personal and professional background. Ethical approval has been obtained from the Sud-Est VI Ethics Committee (reference no. 25.0555.000354, 14/03/2025). ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT06996275.
Miquel et al. (Wed,) studied this question.