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Individuals exposed to traumatic events can develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and depression, but also subclinical behavioral and emotional changes. Although persons exposed to trauma without PTSD show greater resilience, and are better at regulating emotions, with respect to trauma survivors with PTSD, they are anyway more prone to develop physical and psychological maladaptive changes to subsequent stressful experiences. Indeed, especially persons surviving to natural disasters, as earthquakes, can show complex patterns of non-psychopathological responses to traumatic experiences suggesting hypervigilance to signals of threat, and in particular to stimuli conveying self-relevant threatening information. Here, we review neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies uncovering the neural and cognitive mechanisms involved in these non-clinical psychological responses to natural disasters.

Much evidence indicates that neurotypical individuals with high level of autistic traits show performances comparable to those of autistic individuals in visuospatial tasks, such as the embedded figure test and the block design task. On the contrary, the role of autistic-like traits on mental rotation abilities in neurotypical population still remains unclear. The aim of the present study was to investigate in a sample of 315 University students (147 female and 168 male) the influence autistic-related traits (including systemizing and empathizing) on different visuospatial skills, as hidden figure identification and mental rotations, also taking into account the influence of participants’ sex. Results showed significant effect of sex on specific behavioural traits associated with autism, as attention switching and imagination, while no sex differences were found in visuospatial skills. More relevant, results showed that performance on figure disembedding was more related to autism-related social skills while performance on mental rotation was more related to systemizing.

Behavioural evidence suggest that males outperform females in mentally transforming objects, whereas whether sex differences exist in mentally transforming body part images (implicit motor imagery) is an open issue. The aim of the present study was to fill this gap testing performance of 360 healthy participants on a classical behavioural measure of implicit motor imagery: the hand laterality task. Participants had to judge handedness of hand images portrayed from back and palm and presented in different spatial orientations. Two main findings emerged. First, males were significantly faster than females in judging hands portrayed from palm, in particular left palms at 0°, 90° and 180° orientation, whereas females were faster than males in judging backs, in particular left and right backs at 0° and the left back at 90°. Second, both males and females showed a significant biomechanical effect (faster responses for hands portrayed in medial vs. lateral positions) while judging palms, albeit the effect was stronger in males, whereas only females showed a significant biomechanical effect when judging backs. Thus, males and females seem to differently exploit motor simulation processes during mental transformation of hand images depending on a specific familiarity with body parts portrayed from different views. This result might be taken into account when tailoring motor imagery tasks in applied contexts, as motor rehabilitation.