Emotional distress and positive and negative memories from military deployment: the influence of PTSD symptoms and time

ABSTRACT

During military deployment, soldiers are confronted with both negative and positive events. What is remembered and how it affects an individual is influenced by not only the perceived emotion of the event, but also the emotional state of the individual. Here we examined the most negative and most positive deployment memories from a company of 337 soldiers who were deployed together to Afghanistan. We examined how the level of emotional distress of the soldiers and the valence of the memory were related to the emotional intensity, experience of reliving, rehearsal and coherence of the memories, and how the perceived impact of these memories changed over time. We found that soldiers with higher levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms were more affected by both their negative and positive memories, compared with soldiers with lower levels of PTSD symptoms. Emotional intensity of the most negative memory increased over time in the group with highest levels of PTSD symptoms, but dropped in the other groups. The present study adds to the literature on emotion and autobiographical memory and how this relationship interacts with an individual’s present level of emotional distress and the passage of time.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• autobiographical memory
• emotion
• military

Acknowledgements

We thank the Danish National Research Foundation grant DNRF89, Danish Council for Independent Research: Humanities, and Royal Danish Defense College, for support. We thank Yvonne Duval Thomsen and Robert Jonasen for help with planning and data collection, Annette Bohn, Julie Søgaard Skovsgaard, and Niels Peter Nielsen for their assistance in coherence coding. We thank Mesud Sarmanlu and Sarah Jakobsen for their assistance with translation and coding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. While we asked for soldiers to note their most negative and most positive memories at each time point, soldiers were given the option to choose a milder event if thinking of the most extreme event caused too much distress.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Danmarks Grundforskningsfond [grant number DNRF89].