ASSESSMENT OF INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES IN GULF-WAR VETERANS - RELATIONSHIP TO PTSD

War stress frequently leads to the subsequent development of psychopat hology including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but recent rese arch has indicated that individual difference factors may alter vulner ability to trauma-related distress. In an effort to examine the potent ial buffering effects of intellectual resources on PTSD development, t his study assessed intellectual functioning in subsets of Persian Gulf War zone veterans with and without PTSD diagnoses. The two subsets, c omprised of 18 PTSD-diagnosed and 23 psychopathology-free Persian Gulf War veterans, were compared on a multi-faceted test of intellectual f unctioning, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised. As compared to psychopathology free veterans, PTSD-diagnosed veterans performed s ignificantly more poorly on tasks of verbal intellectual functioning i ncluding those tasks thought to reflect premorbid functioning. The two groups did not differ on visuospatial tasks or on a task of attention . Findings suggest that intellectual resources, particularly verbal sk ills, may buffer development of stress-related psychopathology followi ng trauma exposure.