military-related words. Indeed, PTSD symptoms and threat reactions contributed to MSP interference effects for high-threat words after controlling for medications, depression, and baseline physiological activity.
Findings by Yehuda, Keefe, Harvey and Levengood (1995) also support the notion of problematic cognitive deficit involving information processing in PTSD. Specifically, the authors investigated a broad range of memory functions for stimuli unrelated to trauma in order to determine whether symptoms such as intrusive memories might reflect an underlying cognitive deficit unrelated to the psychological content of the traumatic memory in patients with PTSD.
Methods involved measuring the intellectual functioning of 20 male combat veterans with PTSD and 12 normal comparison subjects using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). Memory performance was evaluated using the California Verbal Learning Test.
Findings of the study showed that subjects with PTSD evidenced normal abilities in the functions of initial attention, immediate memory, cumulative learning, and active interference from previous learning. However, those with PTSD showed a circumscribed cognitive deficit, manifested by presence of substantial retroactive interference and revealed by significant decrement in retention following exposure to an intervening word list.
It has been proposed that traumas experienced after early childhood actually give rise to two sorts of memory, one that is verbally accessible and one that is automatically accessible through appropriate situational cues. Such a model was used by Brewin, Dalgleish and Joseph (1996) to explain the complex phenomenology of PTSD, including the experiences of reliving the traumatic event and of emotionally processing the trauma. According to the authors, the theory considers three possible outcomes of the emotional processing of trauma, successful completion, chronic processing, an...