Perceptual processing advantages for trauma-related visual cues in post-traumatic stress disorder

Background Intrusive re-experiencing in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) comprises distressing sensory impressions from the trauma that seem to occur ‘out of the blue’. A key question is how intrusions are triggered. One possibility is that PTSD is characterized by a processing advantage for stimuli that resemble those that accompanied the trauma, which would lead to increased detection of such cues in the environment. Method We used a blurred picture identification task in a cross-sectional (n=99) and a prospective study (n=221) of trauma survivors. Results Participants with acute stress disorder (ASD) or PTSD, but not trauma survivors without these disorders, identified trauma-related pictures, but not general threat pictures, better than neutral pictures. There were no group differences in the rate of trauma-related answers to other picture categories. The relative processing advantage for trauma-related pictures correlated with re-experiencing and dissociation, and predicted PTSD at follow-up. Conclusions A perceptual processing bias for trauma-related stimuli may contribute to the involuntary triggering of intrusive trauma memories in PTSD.

• Publication year

  2011

• Venue

  Psychological Medicine

• Publication date

  2011-06-21

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1017/S0033291711001048PMID 21733208PMCID 3226158
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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