Children's vantage point of recalling traumatic events

© 2016 Dawson, Bryant. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This study investigated the recollections of child survivors of the 2004 Asian tsunami in terms of their vantage point and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) responses. Five years after the tsunami, 110 children (aged 7-13 years) living in Aceh, Indonesia were assessed for source of memories of the tsunami (personal memory or second-hand source), vantage point of the memory, and were administered the Children's Revised Impact of Event Scale-13. Fifty-three children (48%) met criteria for PTSD. Two-thirds of children reported direct memories of the tsunami and one-third reported having memories based on reports from other people. More children (97%) who reported an indirect memory of the tsunami recalled the event from an onlooker's perspective to some extent than those who recalled the event directly (63%). Boys were more likely to rely on stories from others to reconstruct their memory of the tsunami, and to adopt an observer perspective. Boys who adopted an observer's perspective had less severe PTSD than those who adopted a field perspective. These findings suggest that, at least in the case of boys, an observer perspectives of trauma can be associated with levels of PTSD.