Emotional impact feedback affects how people remember an analogue trauma event

Abstract

Do external motivational processes—in the form of social influences—shape people's memories for trauma? In this experiment, we examined the effects of social influence on memory and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomology for an analogue traumatic event. Seventy-two participants watched a distressing film; some received feedback about others' reactions to the film that either emphasised or downplayed the distressing nature of the film; control participants received no feedback. A week later, participants reported their symptoms, rated their memory on a number of characteristics and we tested their memory for the film's content. Participants who received feedback downplaying the film reported fewer PTSD-related analogue symptoms and weaker memory characteristics than their counterparts. The results suggest that people's memory phenomenology and analogue symptoms are influenced by others' feedback, but only when others' reactions downplayed the distressing nature of the film.

Keywords:

• Social influences
• Autobiographical memory
• Trauma
• Intrusions

Notes

¹ We replaced two participants: one with incomplete data, and one who responded ‘new’ to all questions on the recognition test.

² This compilation comprised road safety advertisements that screened in Australia: see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = Z2mf8DtWWd8.

³ 12.5% said they never became suspicious; the remainder became suspicious: when they read the introduction to our manipulation check, which explained the use of deception (45.8%), in the last few minutes (2.8%), during the memory test (11.1%), between the first and second sessions (15.3%), during Session 1 (9.7%), when they first signed up for the study (4.2%).

⁴ The pattern of results are identical when the BDI is added to the analysis as a covariate, F(2, 68) = 4.26, p = .02, .

⁵ Note that we did not make any statistical corrections for multiple comparisons because we had specific predictions about the effects of feedback. However, our results should be interpreted in light of the fact that we did not correct for multiple comparisons (see also Boals, Hathaway, & Rubin, 2011; Rubin et al., 2008).