Abstract Traumatic stress exposure is can lead to cognitive-affective dysfunction in the form of adverse neuropsychiatric sequalae including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and dissociation. Neuroscience research implicates a core threat neurocircuit – composed of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), hippocampus, and amygdala – as central to threat-related processes and disrupted in trauma and stress-related disorders. However, while there is an appreciation that pretraumatic stressors influence the psychobiological outcomes after trauma, limited research to date investigates how disproportionate exposure to stress between racial groups may be reflected in neural signatures of PTSD. Here, we discuss emergent research on neural associations between racially inequitable stressor exposure, neurobiology, and trauma-related outcomes. Human imaging data across several cohorts, across childhood/adulthood and non-trauma/trauma-exposed samples will be presented, highlighting potential long-term ramifications of race-related stress. Further, the relevance of such disproportionate exposures to the generation of accurate and generalizable neural signatures of PTSD and other trauma-related outcomes will be discussed.
