Journal
JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR THERAPY AND EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHIATRY
Volume 45, Issue 4, Pages 421-426Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.jbtep.2014.05.001
Keywords
Intrusive memory; Involuntary memory; Emotional memory; PTSD; Gender; Femininity; Communality
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Background: Men and women show differences in performance on emotional processing tasks. Sex also interacts with personality traits to affect information processing. Here we examine effects of sex, and two personality traits that are differentially expressed in men and women instrumentality and communality - on voluntary and involuntary memory for distressing video-footage. Methods: On session one, participants (n = 39 men; 40 women) completed the Bern Sex-Role Inventory, which assesses communal and instrumental traits. After viewing film-footage of death/serious injury, participants recorded daily involuntary memories (intrusions) relating to the footage on an online diary for seven days, returning on day eight for a second session to perform a voluntary memory task relating to the film. Results: Communality interacted with sex such that men with higher levels of communality reported more frequent involuntary memories. Alternatively, a communality x sex interaction reflected a tendency for women with high levels of communality to perform more poorly on the voluntary recognition memory task. Limitations: The study involved healthy volunteers with no history of significant psychological disorder. Future research with clinical populations will help to determine the generalizability of the current findings. Conclusion: Communality has separate effects on voluntary and involuntary emotional memory. We suggest that high levels of communality in men and women may confer vulnerability to the negative effects of stressful events either through the over-encoding of sensory/perceptual-information in men or the reduced encoding of contextualised, verbally-based, voluntarily accessible representations in women. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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