The Nature of Shared Traumatic Experiences: When, How, and How Often Do We Share Trauma With Others?

Across two studies, we investigated when, how, and how often people share traumatic events ( = 1008). In Study 1, most participants (78.5%) perceived their most stressful/traumatic event as shared primarily due to knowing others were present during the event (physical sharing), knowing/believing others had experienced or could experience a similar event (relational sharing), discussing the event with others (verbal sharing), or having the same emotions about the event as others (emotional sharing).

To be aware or not aware: Do intrusions with and without meta-awareness differ?

People sometimes re-experience traumatic events via intrusive memories that spontaneously and unintentionally intrude into consciousness (i.e., intrusions).

Does enhanced memory of disgust vs. fear images extend to involuntary memory?

People remember disgusting stimuli better than fearful stimuli, but do disgust's memory-enhancing effects extend to memory? This question is important because disgust reactions occur following trauma, and trauma-related involuntary memories are a hallmark of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms. In two experiments, we presented participants (= 88 Experiment 1; = 106 Experiment 2) with disgust, fear, and neutral images during an attention-monitoring task. Participants then completed an undemanding vigilance task, responding any time an image involuntarily came to mind.

People experience similar intrusions about past and future autobiographical negative experiences.

We know much about people's problematic reactions-such as distressing intrusions-to negative, stressful, or traumatic events. But emerging evidence suggests people react similarly to negative and potentially-traumatic events. Given similar processes underlie remembering the past and imagining the future more generally, we wondered how similar involuntary memories, or intrusions, are for experienced vs.

Adding brief content-related information to sensitive-content screens does not exacerbate screen- or image-related distress.

Content descriptions presented on sensitive-content screens reduce how often people view negative images. But does this reduction in exposure come at an emotional cost? Across two experiments, we investigated this possibility. In Experiment 1, we compared participants' change in state anxiety when exposed to sensitive-content screens with and without brief and detailed content descriptions.

The effect of image category and incidental arousal on boundary restriction.

People's memory for scenes has consequences, including for eyewitness testimony. Negative scenes may lead to a particular memory error, where narrowed scene boundaries lead people to recall being closer to a scene than they were. But boundary restriction-including attenuation of the opposite phenomenon boundary extension-has been difficult to replicate, perhaps because heightened arousal accompanying negative scenes, rather than negative valence itself, drives the effect.

To Look or Not to Look: Instagram's Sensitive-Content Screens Do Not Deter Vulnerable People From Viewing Negative Content.

By blurring sensitive images and providing a warning, Instagram's sensitive-content screens seek to assist users-particularly vulnerable users-in making informed decisions about what content to approach or avoid. Yet, prior research found most people (∼85%) chose to uncover a single screened negative image (Bridgland, Bellet, et al., 2022).

A nervous wait: Instagram's sensitive-content screens cause anticipatory anxiety but do not mitigate reactions to negative content.

Online platforms like Instagram cover potentially distressing imagery with a sensitive-content screen (blurred imagery plus a content warning). Previous research suggests people typically choose to "uncover" and view screened content. In three studies, we investigated whether the presence of screens mitigates the negative of viewing content.

Exploring intrusions without awareness: A preliminary study of the characteristics and influences of meta-awareness failures.

Background And Objectives: Research shows that people can lack meta-awareness (i.e., being explicitly aware) of their trauma-related thoughts, which impacts our understanding of re-experiencing symptoms, a key symptom type in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), assessed through self-report.

Emotional stimuli similarly disrupt attention in both visual fields.

People often need to filter relevant from irrelevant information. Irrelevant distractors interrupt this process. But does the degree to which emotional distractors disrupt attention depend on which visual field they appear in? We thought it might for two reasons: (1) people pay slightly more attention to the left than the right visual field, and (2) some research suggests the right-hemisphere (which, in early visual processing, receives left visual field input) has areas specialised for processing emotion.

Disgust and fear reactions uniquely affect intrusions and posttraumatic stress symptoms.

Disgust reactions commonly occur during/following trauma and predict posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms. Yet, disgust is not mentioned in DSM-5 PTSD criteria. To investigate disgust's clinical significance in PTSD, we measured the relationship between disgust (and fear) reactions to a personal trauma, and problematic intrusion characteristics (e.

I forgot that I forgot: PTSD symptom severity in a general population correlates with everyday diary-recorded prospective memory failures.

Extant research suggests a complex relationship between prospective memory (PM) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity. In a general population, this relationship exists for self-report assessment but not objective, in-lab PM performance (e.g.

Posttraumatic stress disorder symptom severity and functional impairment in the education domain.

To comprehensively understand and treat Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), we need to accurately assess how PTSD symptoms affect people's daily functioning (e.g., in work, study, and relationships).

Something Distressing This Way Comes: The Effects of Trigger Warnings on Avoidance Behaviors in an Analogue Trauma Task.

Avoidance is one of the purported benefits and harms of trigger warnings-alerts that upcoming content may contain traumatic themes. Yet, previous research has focused primarily on emotional responses. Here, we used a trauma analogue design to assess people's avoidance behavior in response to stimuli directly related to an analogue trauma event.

Food for thought: Commentary on Burnette et al. (2021) "Concerns and recommendations for using Amazon MTurk for eating disorder research".

Burnette et al. aimed to validate two eating disorder symptom measures among transgender adults recruited from Mechanical Turk (MTurk). After identifying several data quality issues, Burnette et al.

The effects of computerised metacognitive cognitive bias modification training on the development of adaptive metacognitive beliefs and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

Background And Objectives: Maladaptive metacognitive beliefs are associated with the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms following trauma, however it remains unclear whether training people to adopt healthy metacognitive beliefs helps to protect against the development of PTSD symptoms. We developed and tested a new cognitive bias modification training protocol (CBM) that aimed to prevent analogue PTSD by training people to adopt healthy metacognitive beliefs prior to watching a distressing film.

Methods: Participants (N = 135) received CBM or a control CBM training and then watched a trauma film.

Unprepared: Thinking of a trigger warning does not prompt preparation for trauma-related content.

Background And Objectives: Trigger warnings have been described as helpful-enabling people to "emotionally prepare" for upcoming trauma-related material via "coping strategies." However, no research has asked people what they think they would do when they come across a warning-an essential first step in providing evidence that trigger warnings are helpful.

Methods: Here, participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (n = 260) completed one of two future thinking scenarios; we asked half to think about coming across a warning related to their most stressful/traumatic experience; the others thought about actual content (but no warning) related to their most stressful/traumatic experience.

Are Individuals Always Aware of Their Trauma-Related Intrusive Thoughts? A Study of Meta-Awareness.

Individuals are not always aware of their mental content. We tested whether lack of awareness occurs in those who have experienced trauma, with and without posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We also examined the role of proposed cognitive mechanisms (working memory and inhibition) in explaining unnoticed intrusions.

The cost of being absent: Is meta-awareness of mind-wandering related to depression symptom severity, rumination tendencies and trauma intrusions?

Background: Deng, Li and Tang (2014) reported that depression symptom severity is negatively associated with dispositional mindfulness and importantly, positively associated with zone-outs (mind-wandering without meta-awareness). We replicated and extended their study by exploring possible explanations for these relationships, and by also investigating whether mind-wandering is related to (1) trait rumination subtype-brooding, depressive or reflective, and (2) trauma intrusions-a hallmark PTSD symptom, since both rumination and trauma intrusions strongly correlate with depression. We also explored if dispositional mindfulness-the opposing construct of mind-wandering-mediated these relationships.

Mechanisms underlying memory enhancement for disgust over fear.

Disgust is remembered better than fear, despite both emotions being highly negative and arousing. But the mechanisms underlying this effect are not well-understood. Therefore, we compared two proposed mechanisms underlying superior memory for disgust.

Danger! Negative memories ahead: the effect of warnings on reactions to and recall of negative memories.

A trigger warning is an alert that upcoming material containing distressing themes might "trigger" the details and emotion associated with a to come to mind. Warnings supposedly prevent or minimise this distress. But, do warnings really have this effect? To simulate the experience described above, here, we examined whether warning participants-by telling them that recalling a negative event would be distressing-would change characteristics associated with the immediate and delayed recall of a negative event (such as phenomenology e.

The role of belief in memory amplification for trauma events.

Background And Objectives: Trauma survivors often report trauma events inconsistently over time. Many studies, for example, have found that people report having experienced trauma events that they initially failed to report or remember, a phenomenon called "memory amplification." Other studies have found the opposite: people report experiencing fewer events over time.

Right Hemisphere Memory Bias Does Not Extend to Involuntary Memories for Negative Scenes.

Attention is unequally distributed across the visual field. Due to greater right than left hemisphere activation for visuospatial attention, people attend slightly more to the left than the right side. As a result, people voluntarily remember visual stimuli better when it first appears in the left than the right visual field.

Why the COVID-19 pandemic is a traumatic stressor.

The COVID-19 pandemic does not fit into prevailing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) models, or diagnostic criteria, yet emerging research shows traumatic stress symptoms as a result of this ongoing global stressor. Current pathogenic event models focus on past, and largely direct, trauma exposure to certain kinds of life-threatening events. Yet, traumatic stress reactions to future, indirect trauma exposure, and non-Criterion A events exist, suggesting COVID-19 is also a traumatic stressor which could lead to PTSD symptomology.

Preliminary evidence for a relationship between prospective memory and PTSD symptoms in the general population.

Introduction: PTSD sufferers often have problems with remembering the past, but do they also have trouble remembering tasks to be completed in the future? We argue characteristics of PTSD-such as negative appraisals and maladaptive strategies-might contribute to biased reporting of prospective memory failures among PTSD sufferers-or people with severe PTSD symptoms-within a general population.

Methods: Mechanical Turk participants completed a questionnaire battery measuring self-report prospective memory, PTSD symptoms, negative appraisals and maladaptive strategies (e.g.