To mention or not to mention? The inclusion of self-reported most traumatic and most positive memories in the life story

Abstract

Many theories on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) make assumptions on the relationship between PTSD and centrality of traumas to the life story and identity. Although the Centrality of Event Scale (CES; Berntsen & Rubin, 2006) is a popular measure of centrality of personally experienced events to the life story, no studies have examined whether self-rated "central" events are mentioned, when individuals recount their lives. It is also unknown if mentioning specific event types in the life story is related to psychological health or life story coherence. We asked 386 adults to write their life stories, nominate their most traumatic and positive events, rate these events on the CES, and complete measures of PTSD and depression. Two-thirds of the sample mentioned at least one event, with the positive event being mentioned twice as often as the trauma. Mentioned events were more central than nonmentioned events. Participants who mentioned their trauma scored higher on symptoms of PTSD and depression than participants who only mentioned their positive event, but did not write less coherent life stories. Further, death-and illness-related traumas were mentioned more often than accidents and disasters. Findings are discussed in relation to theories on trauma memory in PTSD.

Is young age a risk factor for PTSD? Age differences in PTSD-symptoms after Hurricane Florence.

“…Thus, the current study may not have been able to detect age-group differences in event centrality simply because too few participants considered the event central to their life stories. Previous research have found natural disasters to be relatively weakly associated with PTSD compared to other trauma types (Darves-Bornoz et al, 2008;Kessler et al, 1995), just as accident and disaster type traumas have been found to be less likely to be included in life stories (Kongshøj et al, 2022). Thus, to test whether young adults consider traumas as more central to their life story than other adults do, future research should focus on participants who are victims of trauma types known to be highly related to PTSD.…”

Does age matter in posttraumatic stress disorder? The effects of age, event centrality, and trauma type on trauma aftermath.

“…The present study is based on parts of the dataset employed in Kongshøj et al (2021), and participants and methods between the two articles are partially overlapping. Participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) through the Cloud Research platform (Litman et al, 2017).…”

“…Participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) through the Cloud Research platform (Litman et al, 2017). Participants in the present study took part in a larger survey with a total of 386 native English-speaking participants (see Kongshøj et al, 2021, for details on the larger survey sample). In the present study, only participants whose most traumatic event happened when they were 14-25 years old (hereafter referred to as "youth trauma group"), and participants whose most traumatic event happened after they turned 30 (hereafter referred to as "adult trauma group") were included.…”

“…After providing demographic information, participants wrote their life story and imagined future events. These tasks are not relevant to the present study and will therefore not be described further (see Kongshøj et al, 2021, for further details). Participants then completed a measure of lifetime traumatic exposure, the Life Events Checklist for DSM-5 (LEC-5; Weathers, Blake, et al, 2013), in which participants also identified the event they at the time of answering the survey considered to be the worst they had ever experienced.…”

“…Practice continued until the coders felt comfortable doing the scorings themselves. The trauma type and coherence scorings were also reported in Kongshøj et al (2021).…”