Information processing in post-traumatic stress disorder.
Previous research has established that patients suffering from anxiety disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), exhibit a cognitive bias that selectively favours the processing of threat material. This information processing bias has frequently been demonstrated by subjects' performance on the Stroop colour-naming task. The current experiment investigated the selective processing of threat information in people with PTSD using a modified Stroop procedure. Subjects were 13 ferry disaster survivors with high PTSD symptomatology, 20 survivors of the same disaster with low PTSD symptomatology, and 12 non-traumatized control subjects. All were asked to colour-name five types of words: ferry disaster words, general threat words, neutral semantically-unrelated words, neutral semantically-related words, and positive words. The disaster survivors with high levels of PTSD symptomatology evidenced a significantly longer response latency for colour-naming disaster-related words than for other word types. The results of the low-PTSD survivors and non-traumatized controls showed no significant difference between response latencies for general threat words and disaster word, although all 3 groups showed increased latencies for threat words compared with neutral words. The mechanisms proposed to underlie this response pattern are discussed, and clinical implications are considered.
Thrasher
S M
SM
Psychology Department, Institute of Psychiatry, DeCrespigny Park, Denmark Hill, London, U.K.
Dalgleish
T
T
Yule
W
W
D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D003118:Color Perception; D004190:Disasters; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011340:Problem Solving; D012767:Ships; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000523:psychology*; D013534:Survival / Q000523:psychology*