Building Spiritual Strength (BSS) is an 8-session, spiritually integrated group intervention designed to address religious strain and enhance religious meaning making for military trauma survivors. It is based upon empirical research on the relationship between spirituality and adjustment to trauma. To assess the intervention's effectiveness, veterans with histories of trauma who volunteered for the study were randomly assigned to a BSS group (n = 26) or a wait-list control group (n = 28). BSS participants showed statistically significant reductions in PTSD symptoms based on self-report measures as compared with those in a wait-list control condition. Further research on spiritually integrated interventions for trauma survivors is warranted.

Research on social support and job satisfaction has yielded mixed results, partly because studies have rarely examined different types of workplace social support, such as collegial support, task support, coaching, and career mentoring. This study identified the relative contributions of different types of social support to job satisfaction and explored the relationship between social support and job tenure. Overall, social support accounted for approximately 17% of the variance in job satisfaction and 9% of the variance in job tenure. Career mentoring and task support were the types of social support most predictive of job satisfaction. Coaching and task support were the types of social support most predictive of job tenure.

While some trauma survivors find their faith helpful in recovery, others find it a source of distress, and still others abandon their faith. More complex conceptualizations of religious functioning are needed to explore its relationship with trauma. This study explores such relationships using measures of religious action and behaviors in a community sample of 327 church-going, self-identified trauma survivors. A principal components analysis of positive and negative religious coping, religious comforts and strains, and prayer functions identified two dimensions: Seeking Spiritual Support, which was positively related to posttraumatic growth, and Religious Strain, which was positively related to posttraumatic symptoms.

In a recent paper (Georgopoulos et al 2010 J. Neural Eng. 7 016011) we reported on the power of the magnetoencephalography (MEG)-based synchronous neural interactions (SNI) test to differentiate post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) subjects from healthy control subjects and to classify them with a high degree of accuracy. Here we show that the main differences in cortical communication circuitry between these two groups lie in the miscommunication of temporal and parietal and/or parieto-occipital right hemispheric areas with other brain areas. This lateralized temporal-posterior pattern of miscommunication was very similar but was attenuated in patients with PTSD in remission. These findings are consistent with observations (Penfield 1958 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 44 51-66, Penfield and Perot 1963 Brain 86 595-696, Gloor 1990 Brain 113 1673-94, Banceaud et al 1994 Brain 117 71-90, Fried 1997 J. Neuropsychiatry Clin. Neurosci. 9 420-8) that electrical stimulation of the temporal cortex in awake human subjects, mostly in the right hemisphere, can elicit the re-enactment and re-living of past experiences. Based on these facts, we attribute our findings to the re-experiencing component of PTSD and hypothesize that it reflects an involuntarily persistent activation of interacting neural networks involved in experiential consolidation.