Abstract
Vietnam combat veterans either with or without posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) participated in a computerized Stroop color-naming experiment in which they named the colors of neutral, positive, negative, and combat words. Idiographic stimulus selection established the personal emotional significance of the stimuli. Words appeared either randomly or blocked by type. Results indicated that PTSD patients exhibited more interference for combat words than for other words, whereas control subjects exhibited similar, but less pronounced, patterns of interference. Positive words produced no more interference than neutral words, and much less than combat words. This paradigm may provide a nonintrospective index of intrusive cognition in traumatized people.
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Preparation of this article was supported, in part, by a grant from the Henry and Ramsey Pevsner Fund in Neuropsychology and Behavioral Medicine awarded to Susan P. Kaspi, and by National Institute of Mental Health grant MH43809 awarded to Richard J. McNally. We thank Howard J. Lipke, Roger C. Metz, Robert J. O'Brien, and Austin Staunton for their invaluable assistance in subject recruitment. Finally, we appreciate the superb comments made by an anonymous reviewer.
This experiment was conducted when the authors were at the Department of Psychology, University of Health Sciences/The Chicago Medical School.
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Kaspi, S.P., McNally, R.J. & Amir, N. Cognitive processing of emotional information in posttraumatic stress disorder. Cogn Ther Res 19, 433–444 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02230410
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02230410