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Presentation: Cognition and PTSD

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  • Presentation: Cognition and PTSD

The following presentation supports the study of the cognitive etiologies of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

You are not expected to learn all of the material in this presentation.  When using this study for revision, remember to:

  • Focus on key concepts
  • Learn 2 - 3 studies that you feel you understand.  You may also, instead, learn studies from the textbook or from your teacher.
  • Focus on key evaluation points

Presentation

Evaluation of cognitive explanations of PTSD

  • There are several studies that show a correlation between early childhood experience and PTSD after adult trauma.
  • Cognitive therapy based on schema restructuring has shown to be effective in the treatment of PTSD.
  • The theory helps to explain differences in the symptoms and severity of different individuals with PTSD.
  • Military psychologists have argued that the theory has predictive validity for soldiers in combat.
  • Prospective studies have made it possible to eliminate bidirectional ambiguity in the study of the role of locus of control in the development of the disorder.
  • It is not possible to eliminate biological factors as a result of childhood experience in the explanation of PTSD.
  • Questionnaires rely on self-reported data which is open to memory distortion.
  • The Aetiology-Treatment fallacy argues that just because treatment may be successful does not mean that schema are the cause of the disorder. It could mean that having negative schema is a symptom and thus the symptoms are being treated, rather than the actual origin of the disorder.
  • Cognitive arguments may not explain all cases of PTSD; not all trauma is equal or may not result in the same responses.
  • A lot of the research on PTSD has sampling bias. War veterans are relatively easy to find as a sample. Sufferers from other trauma are less so. Veterans often use common services, meet in groups or are actually still in the military. There are records of deployment and medical records. The common way of getting other PTSD patients is through voluntary sampling - often done by newspaper ads - or by network (snowball) sampling.
  • Most research is retrospective in nature, making it difficult to know if the individual's current locus of control has changed as a result of the trauma.