| Memory processes after exposure to severe trauma |
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People exposed to shocking, horrific events, experience longlasting negative effects. Some suffer a chronic combination of symptoms that is at the core of the debilitating condition called posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): re-experiencing, heightened physiological preparedness and avoidance behaviours. PTSD is unique among the anxiety disorders because instead of being preoccupied with a future threat, the mental life of sufferers is dominated by an event that has already taken place. For this reason, Richard McNally and others have argued that PTSD can be seen as a disorder of memory, and have begun a research programme to uncover the cognitive patterns of impairment that underpin PTSD: how do PTSD patients think and remember differently to trauma-exposed people without PTSD? Over the past few years we have carried out several studies investigating cognitive processing in PTSD patients, in collaboration with colleagues from the University Clinical Center, Tuzla, Bosnia, and the NGO Horizonti from the same town. Tuzla is a town of around 200 000 inhabitants, in northern Bosnia, and was the main Muslim enclave during the war from 1992 to 1996. The war was the most brutal in Europe since World War II, and in all involved countries there is still a large number of severely traumatised people with long-term psychological problems, in many cases largely untreated. Still, in line with one of the main findings of the epidemiology of PTSD, people are resilient, and a majority of people exposed to severe trauma do not suffer from PTSD. In order to investigate whether there is a trauma-specific deficit of source-monitoring in PTSD, we are using a range of experimental paradigms to compare the performance of PTSD patients to that of trauma-exposed controls. For example, in one study we investigated the occurrence of the DRM memory illusion. In this task, participants try to remember lists of words. Each lists is constructed such that all the words are associates of another nonpresented word, the so-called “critical lure.” The fascinating finding with this paradigm is that people often recall or recognise the critical lure, and may be sure that it was presented, when it was not. In our study (link to Brennen, Dybdahl, & Kapidzic, 2007) we made lists related to the war, and others not related to it. For the words that were in fact presented, we replicated the common finding that PTSD patients recall less than controls, and this was true for war words and for nonwar words (see Figure 1). However for (by definition, incorrect) recall of critical lures, another pattern was found: for nonwar lists the groups were equally likely to recall the lure word, whereas for war lures, the PTSD group recalled more than the control group. Other research questions More recently, my PhD student, Ines Blix, has begun a project to study cognitive processing in PTSD patients in Norway, in collaboration with Atle Dyregrov. PTSD can be caused by a range of rather different types of trauma, e.g. car accidents, fires, sexual assault. Do different traumas lead to similar disturbances of cognitive processing? Is automatic inhibition impaired in PTSD? Principal researchers CSHC Collaborators |
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Memory processes after exposure to severe trauma