Stressful situations serve vital functions in a person's existence, such as preparing them

to meet the challenges of everyday life and enhancing their chances of survival. As a

result, it should come as no surprise that stimulating and emotionally salient stimuli

quickly catch attention and have a significant impact on how information is processed,

encoded, stored, and retrieved. The effects of severe levels of stress, on the other

hand, can be disastrous to one's ability to function normally. Nowhere is this more

evident than in psychiatric diseases such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

(PTSD). PTSD arises after being exposed to horrific and life-threatening experiences,

and it is defined by acute reliving of the traumatic event through disturbing memories

and dreams, avoidance of reminders of the incident, and hypervigilance toward potential

risks in the environment. These distinguishing characteristics include impairments in

cognitive skills such as memory, attention, planning, and problem solving, underlining

the influence that emotion has on cognitive performance. After being exposed to horrific

and life-threatening situations such as wars, motor vehicle accidents, and physical or

sexual assault, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) develops. Psychological trauma

can have long-term cognitive consequences due to the emotional experience it causes.

The hallmark symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) include impairments

in cognitive processes such as memory, attention, planning, and problem solving,

highlighting the deleterious influence that unpleasant emotions have on cognitive

functioning. As a result, understanding the dynamic interplay between emotion and

cognition is a major issue for PTSD researchers and treatment providers. Contemporary

cognitive models of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) propose that a

preponderance of information processing resources are allocated toward threat

detection and the interpretation of innocuous stimuli as threatening, narrowing one's

attentional focus at the expense of other cognitive operations. Years of study have

demonstrated support for these cognitive theories of post-traumatic stress disorder

(PTSD) utilizing a variety of tasks and methodological approaches. The major purpose

of this review is to provide an overview of the most recent neurocognitive and

neuroimaging studies on emotion-cognition connections in posttraumatic stress disorder

(PTSD). In order to directly examine the influence of emotion on cognition and vice

versa, the research assessed used challenge tasks that comprised both cognitive and

emotional components. The findings give evidence that post-traumatic stress disorder

(PTSD) is associated with memory and attention problems that are commonly related

with alterations in functional brain activity. The findings are discussed in order to give

future options for study that may lead to the development of better and more effective

therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).