HIERARCHICAL ELABORATION IN THE CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURES OF VIETNAM COMBAT VETERANS

Sixty male Vietnam combat veterans, 30 hospitalized for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 30 with no PTSD or other psychiatric disord er, sorted and labeled their life events into numeric matrices (repert ory grids). Through hierarchical-classes analysis of a subject's matri x, we could compare the hierarchical level (elaboration) of the subjec t's constructs of a negative combat event with the hierarchical levels of other subjects' constructs of negative combat events and with the subject's precombat life event construction. As predicted, the level o f construct elaboration was virtually identical for the two groups for precombat non-trauma-related events but was reduced in the PTSD group for the negative combat event. In addition, the Pythagorean distance scores of the PTSD group indicated less conceptual distance between th e negative combat event and negative life events after Vietnam compare d with the non;PTSD group's scores. Patients with PTSD rated negative life events more extremely (fewer ''shades of gray'' ratings) than did the non-PTSD group, especially life events that occurred after Vietna m.