ABSTRACT
Military deployment and, in particular, combat deployment (Smith et al. 2008) can have profound effects on mental health (Thomas et al. 2010) and lead to increased prevalence rates of psychiatric disorders (Larson et al. 2008) as well as alcohol and substance use (Seal et al. 2011); subsequently, these effects negatively impact social functioning and employability and result in increased utilization of health care services (Hoge et al. 2006). However, much less understood and studied are the effects of recovery from deployment stress as they relate to soldier’s performance. Others have stressed that there is a clear need for a quantitative approach to assess cognitive functioning of soldiers exposed to high-stress environments, to provide early detection of individual health and military performance impairments and management of occupational and deployment health risks (Friedl et al. 2007). The need for an objective assessment of performance is underscored by a recent study which found that self-reported cognitive functioning was not correlated with objective cognitive abilities. Instead, perceived cognitive decits were associated with depression,
Exposure to Extreme Environments, Performance, and Brain Functioning ............ 51 Resilience ................................................................................................................. 52 Interoception and its Neural Substrates: A Novel Approach to Resilience and Stress Assessment .................................................................................................... 53 Optimal Performance: A Link to Efcient Interoceptive Processing ...................... 55 Reframing Resilience ............................................................................................... 57 References ................................................................................................................ 58
anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; Spencer et al. 2010). Moreover, longitudinal work is required to examine the trajectory of performance changes and recovery (Vasterling et al. 2009).
