Elsevier

Journal of Anxiety Disorders

Volume 14, Issue 5, September–October 2000, Pages 521-534
Journal of Anxiety Disorders

Memory Bias for Emotional Information in Children and Adolescents with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Preliminary Study

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0887-6185(00)00037-2Get rights and content

Abstract

Studies with adult participants with emotional disorders have revealed an explicit memory bias in favor of recalling negative emotional information, particularly if the information is related to the participants' emotional concerns. This process was investigated in a preliminary study with children and adolescents with posttraumatic stress disorder and control participants. Participants were presented with sets of negative, neutral, and positive words and asked to recall them after a short retention interval. Posttraumatic stress disorder participants showed poorer overall memory performance compared with control participants. They also showed a bias in favor of recalling negative information, but there was no evidence of any specificity beyond this for threat- related material. Regression analyses revealed no relationship between mood, memory bias, and age. Results are discussed in terms of the adult literature and with respect to issues of the developmental continuity of posttraumatic stress disorder.

Section snippets

Participants

The clinical group comprised 24 children and adolescents (13 boys and 11 girls), aged 9 to 17 years, who met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, criteria for a primary diagnosis of PTSD (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). All of the participants with PTSD were involved in either road traffic or personal violence events (not including abuse or domestic violence) in the 2 years before the study and were recruited through clinicians of the Psychology

Results

As Table 1 shows, there were no significant differences between the groups for age, verbal intelligence quotient, or reading ability, but the PTSD group, as expected, scored significantly higher on the measures of depression, t(47) = 3.55, p < .001, and anxiety, t(47) = 3.25, p < .001 (both one tailed). The groups were comparable in terms of sex ratio, χ2 < 1. Posttraumatic stress disorder participants' scores on the Revised Impact of Event Scale were comparable with studies of child survivors

Discussion

The present study sought to investigate memory for emotionally negative, emotionally positive, and neutral information in groups of children and adolescents with PTSD and matched control participants using a computerized recall and recognition test of memory for word lists.

The results indicated that overall, as predicted, the PTSD group recalled fewer words than the control participants. There was also a significant interaction effect as predicted, with the PTSD group recalling more negative

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