PTSD Symptom Severity and Emotion Regulation Strategy Use During Trauma Cue Exposure Among Patients With Substance Use Disorders: Associations With Negative Affect, Craving, and Cortisol Reactivity☆
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 133 patients (59 women) from an inpatient SUD treatment facility who reported exposure to a PTSD Criterion A traumatic event (APA, 2013) on the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale (Blake et al., 1990). Participants ranged from 18 to 60 years of age (Mean = 34.59, SD = 10.28) and were ethnically diverse (52.6% White; 45.1% African American; 0.8% Latina/o, 0.8% Native American, 0.8% Asian American). Regarding educational attainment, 31.6% of participants reported receiving their
Preliminary data
The mean PTSD symptom severity score of participants on the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale was 27.87 (SD = 35.15; range = 0–106), and 34.6% (n = 46) met criteria for a current diagnosis of PTSD. With regard to the specific traumatic events reported by participants that met Criterion A for PTSD, 20.3% reported the sudden, unexpected death of a loved one; 18.0% reported assault with a weapon; 15.0% reported physical assault; 15.0% reported sexual assault; 12.8% reported a transportation
Discussion
The present study sought to examine the relations of PTSD symptom severity to the use of specific emotion regulation strategies in the context of trauma-related emotional distress among trauma-exposed SUD patients, as well as the indirect relations of PTSD symptom severity to trauma cue reactivity through different emotion regulation strategies. Consistent with past findings that PTSD is associated with emotion regulation strategies characterized by emotional avoidance or control (Bardeen et
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.
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This study was supported in part by R21 DA030587 awarded to the second author (MTT) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.