title: Emotional experiencing in women with posttraumatic stress disorder: congruence between facial expressivity and self-report.
abstract: The congruence between facial expressivity and self-report of emotion was examined among 11 women with sexual assault-related PTSD and 8 women without PTSD, under both a neutral and a sexual assault prime condition. The PTSD group demonstrated some incongruities in emotional responding. Although the PTSD group was as facially expressive as the control group, they reported more arousal to the emotional stimuli. Further, an inverse relationship between negative facial expressivity and self-report to negative stimuli was found for some variables for the PTSD group only, such that the less expressions they showed facially, the more negative they reported feeling. However, the overall pattern of results suggests fewer significant relationships between expression and experience than predicted.
authors.affiliation: National Center for PTSD, Women's Health Sciences Division, Boston VA Health Care System, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. awwagner@u.washington.edu
authors.forename: Amy W
authors.initials: AW
authors.lastname: Wagner
authors.forename: Lizabeth
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Roemer
authors.forename: Susan M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Orsillo
authors.forename: Brett T
authors.initials: BT
authors.lastname: Litz
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D010465:Perception; D012742:Sex Offenses / Q000523:psychology*; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000523:psychology*