The Research of Association between Overgeneral Memory and Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms with the adult survivors of the 921 Earthquake
Date Issued
2005
Date
2005
Author(s)
Kung, Yi-Wen
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
This study aims to investigate the possible association between overgeneral memory and posttraumatic stress symptoms with earthquake survivors in Taiwan. Intrusion and avoidance, as the main posttraumatic stress symptoms, reflect the cognitive processing state of traumatic information in survivors. Many empirical studies have found overgenerality of autobiographical memory in survivors. Both clinical therapists and theorist think that remission of posttraumatic stress symptoms may accompany more specific description of traumatic event in traumatized clients. Therefore, we infer that there may be plausible association between overgeneral memory and posttraumatic stress symptoms in Earthquake survivors. However, there exists very few empirical studies and most have resulted inconsistently. In addition, most measurements of autobiographical memory fail to specify trauma categories, and the most broadly used AMT paradigm lacks sufficient ecological validity in measuring overgeneral memory. Thus, we conduct the thesis with more sufficient and valid tool and procedure. The participants of this study are 192 adult survivors residing near the epicenter who were recruited three years post the earthquake. The Impact of Events Scale- Chinese Version (IES-C) was used to assess intrusive and avoidance symptoms, the depression subscale of SCL-90-R was used for depressive symptoms, and modified context-based autobiographical memory task was used to assess the memory about 921 earthquake. Results revealed that various indexes of overgeneral memory were found to have various associations with different elements of posttraumatic stress symptoms. More specifically, intrusive symptom correlated negatively with the indexes of not-single event, no-outcome, duration more than one day, no-place, and repeated place. Avoidance symptom correlated positively with the indexes of not-concrete description, duration more than one day, no-place, repeated place, and not-specific person. Moreover, although there is evident comorbidity between PTSD and depression, the above-mentioned significant results hold after controlling for depression. Finally, discussion on the limitation of the present study as well as possible follow-up research is provided.
Subjects
過度概化記憶
九二一地震
創傷後壓力症狀
autobiographic memory
the 921 Taiwan Earthquake
posttraumatic stress symptoms
overgeneral memory
Type
other
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