A recent study published in Psychological Medicine suggests that childhood trauma may alter the way children learn to respond to fear, which could contribute to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adolescence. The researchers found that children who had experienced trauma showed heightened physiological responses to threatening stimuli during a fear-learning task. This heightened response, in turn, was linked to an increase in PTSD symptoms over time. Childhood trauma is unfortunately common, with nearly half of all children in the United States experiencing some form o…