Processing Of Trauma Memories Research Articles

Empathy and emotion regulation: reprocessing memories of childhood abuse.

This article argues that therapist empathy is both an essential context and an active intervention for addressing the emotion regulation problems common among adult survivors of child abuse. We define healthy emotion regulation, the role of parental empathy in the development of these capacities, and the results of abuse and neglect as empathic failures. We define therapeutic empathy and outline how it functions both to modulate arousal and to increase client awareness of emotional experience, thus facilitating emotional processing of trauma memories.

Is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder an Overlearned Survival Response? An Evolutionary-Learning Hypothesis

Contemporary learning theories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) provide an explanation for the phobic avoidant features but do not account fully for the intrusive phenomena that are so characteristic of the disorder. This article hypothesizes that a primitive learning center in the limbic system rehearses traumatic memories immediately following exposure to trauma, thus inducing durable memories of the sources of novel threat. It is postulated that the mechanism developed during early evolution when, in the absence of cognitive mechanisms, automatic learning following single exposure to novel threat would have conferred survival value on the species. With evolution of the brain, a second cortical pathway developed for the cognitive processing of trauma memories. It is possible that synchrony between the two phylogentically distinct pathways may be lost in vulnerable individuals under conditions of extreme stress resulting in failure of cortical inhibition of limbic trauma rehearsal mechanisms. A mismatch between archaic biological mechanisms and novel cues in the modern environment also may play a role in triggering traumatic memories and associated fight and flight reactions. The intrusive phenomena of PTSD thus may reflect an "overlearned survival response" in those in whom the putative limbic rehearsal mechanism evades cortical control. The heuristic value and limitations of such an evolutionary-learning theory are discussed.