DIRECTED FORGETTING OF TRAUMA CUES IN ADULT SURVIVORS OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE WITH AND WITHOUT POSTTRAUMATIC-STRESS-DISORDER

The authors used a directed-forgetting task to investigate whether psy chiatrically impaired adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse exhibi t an avoidant encoding style and impaired memory for trauma cues. The authors tested women with abuse histories, either with or without post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and women with neither abuse histori es nor PTSD. The women saw intermixed trauma words (e.g., molested), p ositive words (e.g., confident), and categorized neutral words (e.g., mailbox) on a computer screen and were instructed either to remember o r to forget each word. Relative to the other groups, the PTSD group di d not exhibit recall deficits for trauma-related to-be-remembered word s, nor did they recall fewer trauma-related to-be-forgotten words than other words. instead, they exhibited recall deficits for positive and neutral words they were supposed to remember. These data are inconsis tent with the hypothesis that impaired survivors exhibit avoidant enco ding and impaired memory for traumatic information.