Implications for Traumatic Recall

Animal Models-Fear Conditioning & Trauma

Animal models rely on nonverbal behavioral observations like increased freezing and startle behaviors and reduced time spent in exploratory behaviors to infer trauma-related emotion. Other measures like monitoring autonomic arousal, neurohormonal changes, etc. can be useful indices for enhancing the understanding of trauma’s neurobiological impact. Animal models for inhibitory avoidance, fear conditioning, and predator exposure simulate human trauma experiences in their characteristic senses of uncontrollability and unpredictability. Loss of control is perceived as more stressful than lack of it due to its comparative contextual awareness to the mouse and to the human. (Read more)

:

PTSD: Applying Consolidation & Extinction

When examining research findings comparing PTSD traumatic and fear conditioning research paradigms, differences can be found. Unlike healthy subjects who participate in fear conditioning studies, individuals with PTSD have functional memory disturbances and a constellation of symptoms. Fear conditioning memory in healthy individuals with an intact hippocampus is easily recallable and retrievable after the fear conditioning session. As noted earlier PTSD trauma memory lacks important personally meaningful and peripheral details and trauma narrative coherence. (Read more)

:

Selective Forgetting & Coping with Trauma

Thought inhibition in healthy controls induces impairments in the ability for retrieving properly sequenced memory, in memory coherency, and produces “snapshots” of events, and increased thought preoccupation. These behaviors also characterize PTSD’s symptoms of avoidance and hotspot perceptual memories as well as descriptions of PTSD trauma narratives. So, chronic states of inhibition in PTSD, do tend to elicit memory impairments & a sense of preoccupation with that which is being inhibited. (Read more)

:

Some Concluding Thoughts on PTSD & Trauma Memory

This portion of the web site sought to examine the nature of PTSD trauma memory within the context of neuroscience findings. In its analysis it was found that patients with PTSD tend to develop memory gaps for traumatic memory that affect the trauma narrative’s coherence and temporal order. These symptoms are also associated with the syndrome and constellation of documented PTSD symptoms. Trauma avoidance and thought suppression-induced impairments in trauma coherence and temporal order result in the development of characteristic symptom progression and disrupt the development of personally meaningful trauma narrative. (Read more)

: