Search

Objective: Although deficits in memory and cognitive processing are evident in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), difficulties with social cognition and the impact of such difficulties on interpersonal functioning are poorly understood. Here, we examined the ability of women diagnosed with PTSD related to childhood abuse to discriminate affective prosody, a central component of social cognition., Method: Women with PTSD and healthy controls (HCs) completed two computer-based tasks assessing affective prosody: (i) recognition (categorizing foreign-language excerpts as angry, fearful, sad, or happy) and (ii) discrimination (identifying whether two excerpts played consecutively had the 'same' or 'different' emotion). The association of performance with symptom presentation, trauma history, and interpersonal functioning was also explored., Results: Women with PTSD were slower than HCs at identifying happiness, sadness, and fear, but not anger in the speech excerpts. The presence of dissociative symptoms was related to reduced accuracy on the discrimination task. An increased severity of childhood trauma was associated with reduced accuracy on the discrimination task and with slower identification of emotional prosody., Conclusion: Exposure to childhood trauma is associated with long-term, atypical development in the interpretation of prosodic cues in speech. The findings have implications for the intergenerational transmission of trauma., (© 2014 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

A theoretical framework referred to as a 4-D model has been described for classifying posttraumatic stress symptoms into those potentially occurring within normal waking consciousness (NWC) versus those thought to intrinsically exemplify dissociative experiences, specifically, trauma-related altered states of consciousness (TRASC). As a further test of this theoretical distinction, this prospective study evaluated whether TRASC and NWC forms of distress incrementally and prospectively predicted functional impairment at 6 and 12 weeks following presentation at hospital emergency departments in the acute aftermath of traumatic events in 180 persons. Establishing the clinical significance of both TRASC and NWC-distress symptoms, we found that 6-week markers of TRASC and NWC-distress independently predicted 12-week self-reported levels of social and occupational impairment. We also observed broad support for various predictions of the 4-D model except that, in contrast with hypotheses, childhood trauma history was generally more strongly correlated with symptoms of NWC-distress than with TRASC. Future research directions are discussed.