COGNITIVE PROCESSING OF EMOTIONAL INFORMATION IN POSTTRAUMATIC-STRESS-DISORDER

Vietnam combat veterans either with or without posttraumatic stress di sorder (PTSD) participated in a computerized Stroop color-naming exper iment in which they named the colors of neutral, positive, negative, a nd combat words. Idiographic stimulus selection established the person al emotional significance of the stimuli. Words appeared either random ly or blocked by type. Results indicated that PTSD patients exhibited more interference for combat words than for other words, whereas contr ol subjects exhibited similar, but less pronounced, patterns of interf erence. Positive words produced no more interference than neutral word s, and much less than combat words. This paradigm may provide a nonint rospective index of intrusive cognition in traumatized people.