Written exposure therapy (WET) is a brief, manualized trauma-focused treatment typically delivered in five individual weekly sessions. Given the brevity and effectiveness of WET, researchers have begun to focus on its delivery in a massed format. However, only one case study examining massed delivery has been published to date.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough the majority of research and clinical interventions focused on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) centers on traumatic memories, recent literature suggests the importance of considering emotionally laden memories more broadly among trauma-exposed individuals. Specifically, trauma-exposed individuals have difficulties retrieving positive and negative memories, and interventions focused on enhancing the retrieval of both traumatic and positive memories benefit overall well-being. These findings led to the development of a novel Processing of Positive Memories Technique (PPMT) for PTSD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objectives: Avoidance, inherent to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology, is theoretically and empirically linked to the maintenance of PTSD symptom severity. While research indicates traumatized individuals avoid positive and trauma memories, several PTSD treatments focus exclusively on traumatic memories. We examined the mediating role of PTSD's avoidance in the relationship between processing positive memories and PTSD cluster severity (intrusion, mood/cognitions, arousal).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMature interpersonal decentering is a form of social cognitive role-taking involving reflective thought about one's interpersonal relationships. Previous research examining main effects for persons, card situation content, story content, and person-card interactions found more mature decentering in stories about heterosexual romantic-pull Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) cards (HRC) as compared with stories about nonromantic cards (NRC). To see whether differences in means corresponded to differential criterion validity, this multi-method study examined Inventory of Interpersonal Problems circumplex (IIP-C) scores associated with young adults' decentering maturity and deficits, comparing correlations with IIP-C scores of decentering scores calculated from HRC versus NRC.
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