The centrality of event scale: a measure of integrating a trauma into one's identity and its relation to post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

By Dorthe Berntsen, David C. Rubin. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2006

778 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce a new scale that measures how central an event is to a person's identity and life story. For the most stressful or traumatic event in a person's life, the full 20-item Centrality of Event Scale (CES) and the short 7-item scale are reliable (alpha's of .94 and .88, respectively) in a sample of 707 undergraduates. The scale correlates .38 with PTSD symptom severity and .23 with depression. The present findings are discussed in relation to previous work on individual differences related to PTSD symptoms. Possible connections between the CES and measures of maladaptive attributions and rumination are considered along with suggestions for future research.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/290813bdaaef0001b46cdbb7aed89b779a3cc06a

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. Cann
2. R. Tedeschi
3. L. Calhoun
4. A. Boals
5. D. Schuettler
6. David C. Rubin
7. Dorthe Berntsen
8. J. Groleau

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. A. Boals
2. A. Cann
3. D. Schuettler
4. R. Tedeschi
5. Dorthe Berntsen
6. L. Calhoun
7. David C. Rubin
8. J. Groleau

Citations in the corpus

• The Path to Posttraumatic Growth Versus Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Contributions of Event Centrality and Coping (2011, methodology): “The Centrality of Events Scale (CES; Berntsen & Rubin, 2006 ) measures the extent an event has been incorporated into an individual's identity.”
• The Integration of Stressful Life Experiences Scale (ISLES): Development and Initial Validation of a New Measure (2010, neutral): “Consistent with its authors’ hypothesis that overidentification with a stressful life event can place one at risk for serious adjustment problems, higher scores on the CES have been shown to be associated with greater psychological distress (Berntsen & Rubin, 2006, 2007).”
• When a trauma becomes a key to identity: Enhanced integration of trauma memories predicts posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms (2007, methodology): “We included the 20-item CES (Berntsen & Rubin, 2006a), the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist (PCL; Blanchard et al., 1996; Weathers et al., 1994), the Dissociative Experience Scale (DES; Bernstein & Putman, 1986), the BDI-II (Beck et al., 1961), the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI;…”
• The role of centrality of events in posttraumatic distress and posttraumatic growth. (2013, background): “As previously noted, highly stressful events that assume a central place in the individual’s life story have been shown to contribute to posttraumatic distress (Berntsen & Rubin, 2006; Berntsen & Rubin, 2007).”