ABSTRACT
Background and Objective:
Idiographic script-driven imagery is core to both research and treatment related to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including among individuals with a history of sexual assault. However, there may be benefit in having alternatives to such idiographic techniques. The current study therefore examined multimodal responding to a standardized audio-recorded narrative of a sexual assault.
Design and Method:
In this experiment, 105 women (Mage = 19.09, SD = 2.24) were recruited from the community and randomly assigned to listen to a depiction of sexual assault (trauma condition) or a similar experience without sexual assault (control condition).
Results:
As hypothesized, relative to the control group, participants in the trauma condition reported greater (a) increases in anxiety, anger, and disgust from pre- to post- manipulation, and (b) distress across the duration of the recording. In contrast to hypotheses, heart-rate did not differ across groups.
Conclusions:
Results suggest listening to a standardized sexual assault narrative, compared to a non-traumatic narrative, effectively increases negative affect. This indicates standardized sexual assault narratives have potential as a traumatic event cue presentation method both for trauma-focused treatment and studying reactions to sexual assault cues.
Data availability statement
The dataset will be made available upon reasonable request.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).