title: Reduced Specificity in Episodic Future Thinking in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.
abstract: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), one of the most common disorders following trauma, has been associated with a tendency to remember past personal memories in a nonspecific, overgeneral way. The present study investigated whether such a bias also applies to projections of future personal events. Trauma survivors (N= 50) generated brief descriptions of imagined future experiences in response to positive and negative cues in a future-based Autobiographical Memory Test. Survivors with PTSD imagined fewer specific future events in response to positive, but not to negative, cues, compared to those without PTSD. This effect was independent of comorbid major depression. Reduced memory specificity in response to positive cues was related to appraisals of foreshortened future and permanent change. Training to enhance specificity of future projections may be helpful in PTSD and protect against potentially toxic effects of autobiographical memory overgenerality.
authors.affiliation: University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Birgit
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Kleim
authors.affiliation: University College London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Belinda
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Graham
authors.affiliation: King's College London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Sonia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Fihosy
authors.affiliation: King's College London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Stott
authors.affiliation: University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Anke
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ehlers
keywords: Autobiographical Memory Test; PTSD; autobiographical memory; autobiographical memory specificity; future memory