Abstract
Many past examinations of memory changes in individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have focused on changes in memory for trauma. However, it is unclear if these mnemonic differences extend beyond the memory of the trauma to memory for other positive and negative information and if they are specific to individuals with PTSD or extend to other individuals who have experienced trauma. The present study examined the influences of trauma exposure and PTSD on an effect that may parallel tunnel memory in PTSD: the emotion-induced memory trade-off, whereby emotional aspects of an experience are remembered at the expense of the nonemotional context. Three groups of participants (25 with current PTSD, 27 who had experienced trauma but did not have current PTSD, and 25 controls who had neither experienced significant trauma nor met criteria for current PTSD) were shown complex visual scenes that included an item (positive, negative, or neutral) placed on a neutral background. Forty-five minutes later, participants underwent a recognition memory test for the items and backgrounds separately. An emotion-induced memory trade-off was said to occur when there was a significant difference in item and background memory for emotional scenes, but not for neutral scenes. Results indicated that people with PTSD, like the other groups, were more likely to remember positive and negative items than neutral items. Moreover, people with PTSD exhibited a memory trade-off comparable in magnitude to that exhibited by the non-trauma control group. In contrast, trauma-exposed people without a current diagnosis of PTSD did not show a trade-off, because they remembered items within scenes better than their accompanying contexts not only for emotional but also for neutral scenes. These results suggest that (1) the effect of emotion on memory for visual scenes is similar in people with PTSD and control participants, and (2) people who have experienced trauma, but do not have PTSD, may have a different way of attending to and remembering visual scenes, exhibiting less of a memory trade-off than either control participants or people with PTSD.
Highlights
Exposure to trauma may induce cognitive changes in the memory system
posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is defined by cognitive changes in involuntary memory for a traumatic incident (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), there is interest in understanding how PTSD may affect the voluntary retrieval of emotional experiences
The purpose of this study is to investigate these three questions: (1) What is the effect of PTSD on memory for positive, negative, and neutral items? (2) What is the effect of PTSD on an emotion-induced memory trade-off? (3) What is www.frontiersin.org the effect of trauma-exposure on an emotion-induced memory trade-off? In the current study, these questions were addressed by testing people with PTSD, people who experienced trauma but do not currently have PTSD, and a control group who reported no experience of trauma
Summary
Exposure to trauma may induce cognitive changes in the memory system (see Vasterling and Brewin, 2005). People with PTSD exhibit involuntary re-experiencing of their trauma (e.g., flashbacks) despite intentionally avoiding stimuli associated with the trauma (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). PTSD is defined by cognitive changes in involuntary memory for a traumatic incident (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), there is interest in understanding how PTSD may affect the voluntary retrieval of emotional experiences. Some studies have found that when participants are asked to freely recall trauma-related and non-trauma-related words embedded in an attentional task (such as an emotional Stroop task), people with PTSD remember proportionally more traumatic words than do non-patient controls (Kaspi et al, 1995; Vrana et al, 1995; Chemtob et al, 1999). Other studies have suggested that PTSD patients may show a response bias to endorse any trauma-related stimulus (Litz et al, 1996) or may have bad memory for non-trauma stimuli rather than good memory for trauma-relevant stimuli (McNally et al, 1998; Paunovic et al, 2002; Golier et al, 2003)
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