Conventional wisdom suggests that repeated traumatic exposure should strongly relate to increased posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. However, research with first responders, who are repeatedly exposed to traumatic events, finds inconsistent links to PTSD. Although recent studies explored associations between general self-reported emotion-regulation and PTSD, the present study was the first to test the moderating role of regulatory choice flexibility, the ability to choose regulatory options that suit contextual demands. A total of 69 firefighters with differing dutyrelated traumatic-exposure were tested on an innovative performance-based regulatory choice flexibility paradigm and evaluated for PTSD symptoms using clinical interviews. We predicted and found that firefighters with low but not high regulatory choice flexibility showed a significant positive correlation between traumatic exposure and PTSD symptoms. This moderation was specific to PTSD symptoms and contributed above and beyond other well-established correlates of PTSD. The results suggest that regulatory choice flexibility can intersect the deleterious link between traumatic exposure and PTSD symptoms.

Previous studies have shown that contextual cues improve memory performance and reduce interference in younger adults. However, it is not clear whether middle-aged and older adults can also benefit from contextual cues, or if this ability diminishes with ageing and cognitive decline. In order to test this question, we tested 69 middle-aged adults (aged 30-50 years) and 65 older adults (aged 65-85). Participants completed a retroactive interference paradigm with or without contextual cues. Cognitive functioning of older adults was assessed using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which is a sensitive and highly validated tool to detect cognitive decline in older age. The results showed that while middle-aged adults were able to benefit from context to improve recognition and reduce interference, older adults were not able to benefit from it. However, when we compared older adults with lower (<26) and higher (≥26) scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, we found that older adults with high cognitive functioning could benefit from context advantage at retrieval to improve recognition compared to those with lower cognitive functioning. Yet, similar to older adults with lower cognitive functioning, they could not benefit from context advantage at encoding and hence were still susceptible to interference.

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