Do savoring beliefs predict posttraumatic stress symptoms following stressful life events?

ABSTRACT

Background and objectives

Savoring beliefs refer to people’s beliefs about their ability to generate, increase, and prolong enjoyment from positive experiences. The role of these beliefs in affecting responses to negative events is largely unexplored. This study aimed to increase knowledge about the role of savoring beliefs in symptoms of posttraumatic stress (PTS) following negative life events and the incremental role of these beliefs beyond the impact of worry, depressive rumination, and neuroticism.

Design

A two-wave longitudinal survey.

Methods

Two-hundred and five students completed the Savoring Beliefs Inventory, measuring one’s ability to generate pleasure from past, present, and anticipated experiences at Time 1 (T1). Six months later (at T2), they rated adverse life-events experienced between T1 and T2 and completed measures of PTS (associated with the most distressing event experienced in this time-frame) and depression.

Results

Savoring beliefs at T1 were correlated with PTS total scores and PTS clusters and depression at T2. Regression analyses indicated that savoring beliefs regarding present and future (but not past) events were associated with some, but not all T2-outcomes, above and beyond worry, depressive rumination, and neuroticism.

Conclusions

This study confirms that increased savoring beliefs could mitigate the impact of confrontation with adverse events.

KEYWORDS:

• Savoring beliefs
• posttraumatic stress
• life-events
• depression

Acknowledgments

Hans Pieterse is gratefully acknowledged for his help in the collection of the data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 No form of compensation other than course credits was given. Course credits could also be obtained with participation in many other studies. Thus, participation in this particular study was not mandatory for potential participants to obtain required course credits.

2 Data at T1 were available from 851 students. At T2, data were provided by 220 students; data from 14 were removed because they reported having experienced no stressful event, data from one because he/she/they did not complete the SBI. The difference in T1 and T2 sample sizes was largely due to the fact that T1 data were gathered at the end of the bachelor education after which many students left the university.

3 Because it was our intention the evaluate the role of pre-existing savoring beliefs in prospectively predicting distress following adversity, we focused on PTS symptoms associated with events happening in the six months between T1 and T2 rather than those associated with negative or traumatic events happening earlier in participant’s lives.

4 We used the PSS-SR, that represents DSM-IV based PTS symptomatology, and not a measure of DSM-5 based PTS symptomatology, because the data collection for this study was initiated before the DSM-5 and DSM-5-based measures were implemented in the Dutch language area. To fit our findings to the DSM-5 conceptualization, we used Rosellini et al.’s (2015) procedure to map DSM-IV-based symptoms onto DSM-5-based symptom clusters.

5 In all Model 1 analyses, variance inflation factors (VIFs) were between 2.15 and 2.54. In all Model 2 analyses, VIFs were between 1.16 and 2.82. In all Model 3 analyses, VIFs were between 1.24 and 3.09. VIFs for all Model 4 analyses ranged between 1.23 and 2.81. These VIFs did not point at problematic collinearity.