Studies like this are always interesting to me in that they tread the line between neuroscience and philosophy. They show that a persons philosophical outlook

Studies like this are always interesting to me in that they tread the line between neuroscience and philosophy. They show that a persons philosophical outlook and thinking controls a great deal of how we process and respond to the world. It's unfortunate that our societies usual reaction to attempting to help those who have experienced trauma by getting them to deal with it and move past it is to decry that as somehow 'victim blaming' or minimizing the trauma. Our brains are amazingly adaptable. We can be trained to be utterly fragile, or amazingly resilient. When shown an image like those shown to Alex to elicit arousal, a person can either identify with the subjects in the photo (an act which actually takes a great deal of mental effort, since images are so profoundly different from reality), or recognize it as an image and deal with it solely as it actually is. Whether you do one or another has substantial consequences for you subjectively. And of course no one but yourself can make that kind of choice.