Reliving, emotions, and fragmentation in the autobiographical memories of veterans diagnosed with PTSD

By David C. Rubin, Michelle E. Feldman, Jean C. Beckham. 2004

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY Fifty veterans diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) each recalled four autobiographical memories: one from the 2 years before service, one non-combat memory from the time in service, one from combat, and one from service that had often come as an intrusive memory. For each memory, they provided 21 ratings about reliving, belief, sensory properties, reexperiencing emotions, visceral emotional responses, fragmentation, and narrative coherence. We used these ratings to examine three claims about traumatic memories: a separation of cognitive and visceral aspects of emotion, an increased sense of reliving, and increased fragmentation. There was evidence for a partial separation of cognitive judgments of reexperiencing an emotion and reports of visceral symptoms of the emotion, with visceral symptoms correlating more consistently with scores on PTSD tests. Reliving, but not fragmentation of the memories, increased with increases in the trauma relatedness of the event and with increases in scores on standardized tests of PTSD severity. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18beecae645ac51b53087d09a42faae303ca8355

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. A. Boals
2. D. Schuettler
3. David C. Rubin
4. Dorthe Berntsen
5. I. Siegler

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Dorthe Berntsen
2. A. Boals
3. David C. Rubin
4. I. Siegler
5. D. Schuettler

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. A. Boals
2. David C. Rubin
3. Dorthe Berntsen
4. D. Schuettler
5. I. Siegler
6. Annette Bohn
7. Jonathan Koppel

Citations in the corpus

• Facets of personality and the phenomenology of autobiographical memory (2004, methodology): “In previous work with the facets of the NEO, Siegler and Brummett (2000) found that all of these facets correlated significantly with a well-being factor labelled 'positive relations with others.”
• The Temporal Dynamics Model of Emotional Memory Processing: A Synthesis on the Neurobiological Basis of Stress-Induced Amnesia, Flashbulb and Traumatic Memories, and the Yerkes-Dodson Law (2007, unknown): “Hence, the original version of the Yerkes-Dodson law is of greater value to behavioral and psychiatric research than the Hebbian version because it incorporates the enhancement, as well as impairment, of memory in times of strong emotion-ality.”
• The Path to Posttraumatic Growth Versus Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Contributions of Event Centrality and Coping (2011, background): “The Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire (AMQ; Rubin et al, 2003 ) measures recollective properties, sensory details, emotional intensity, thoughts, and language/narrative properties of trauma.”
• The centrality of event scale: a measure of integrating a trauma into one's identity and its relation to post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. (2006, background): “However, both claims have found little support when subjected to more systematic experimental examination (e.g., Berntsen et al., 2003; Gray & Lombardo, 2001; Porter & Birt, 2001; Reviere & Bakeman, 2001; Rubin et al., 2004; but see Halligan, Michael, Clark, & Ehlers, 2003).”