This study primarily examined the organization of past and future autobiographical knowledge in a sample of sexual trauma survivors with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) compared to a sample of healthy controls, using a self-descriptive card-sorting task. Participants were asked to imagine that they had to write their autobiography and in preparation that they should divide their past (and future) life into chapters (e.g. ‘school years’ and ‘marriage’). They then characterized each chapter using a list of positive or negative attributes. We explored whether individuals with PTSD possessed a more affectively-compartmentalized life-structure, whereby positive and negative self-attributes showed greater disaggregation into separate chapters. We also examined redundancy (i.e., consistent endorsement) of positive and negative self-attributes across the different life-chapters. Results revealed that the PTSD group overall utilized a greater proportion of negative descriptors, along with greater affective compartmentalization and reduced positive redundancy, across their past life-structure relative to the control participants. Groups did not differ on negative redundancy for the past life structure nor on any metrics for future life structure. Follow-up secondary analyses compared the past life-structure profile for those with PTSD to that of individuals with chronic depression, revealing significantly greater negative redundancy in the depressed group. Our findings are consistent with the prior theoretical and empirical literatures on mechanisms, such as avoidance and dissociation, that are implicated in PTSD as a means of inhibiting the negative impact of past traumatic experiences specifically, and negative information more generally.
Negative posttraumatic cognitions among military sexual trauma survivors