Journal
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 10, Issue 3, Pages 499-513Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/21677026211025018
Keywords
posttraumatic stress disorder; PTSD; brain injury; verbal memory; implicit priming; attention; encoding
Categories
Funding
- Department of Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation RD Program [I01RX000622]
- Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program
- Department of Defense [PT074550]
- Minnesota Veterans Research Institute
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Among individuals with PTSD, verbal learning and memory deficits are related to reexperiencing symptoms and attentional control alterations may explain these deficits. Understanding these findings can have implications for trauma-focused psychotherapy and recovery.
Among individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), verbal learning and memory are areas of weakness compared with other cognitive domains (e.g., visuospatial memory). In this study, previously deployed military veterans completed clinical assessments of word memory and vocabulary (n = 243) and a laboratory task measuring encoding, free recall, repetition priming, and recognition of words (n = 147). Impaired verbal memory was selectively related to reexperiencing symptoms of PTSD but was not associated with other symptom groupings or blast-induced traumatic brain injury. Implicit priming of response times following word repetition was also unrelated to clinical symptoms. Instead, slowed response times during encoding explained associations between reexperiencing and memory performance. These findings are consistent with alterations in attentional control explaining PTSD-related verbal-memory deficits. Such findings have implications for understanding trauma-focused psychotherapy and recovery, which may depend on efficient attentional processing of words to alter posttraumatic reexperiencing symptoms.
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