I Am > Trauma: Experimentally Reducing Event Centrality and PTSD Symptoms in a Clinical Trial

ABSTRACT

Event centrality has been one of the strongest predictors of PTSD symptoms. We attempted to experimentally reduce event centrality using a modified version of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in a sample of traumatized participants from a community outreach center. Relative to a control group, participants who received ACT evidenced significant decreases in PTSD symptoms, depression, and event centrality. A mediation analysis revealed that the effect of condition on PTSD symptoms was mediated by decreases in event centrality. Only the effect of condition on depression was still significant at six weeks posttreatment. This study is the first to manipulate event centrality and suggests that components of ACT may be effective at reducing event centrality.

KEYWORDS:

• Acceptance and commitment therapy
• depression
• event centrality
• intervention
• posttraumatic stress disorder
• randomized clinical trial
• trauma

Acknowledgments

We thank everyone at the Denton County Friends of the Family for allowing us to recruit potential participants, for use of their facilities, and for their general support. In particular, the support from Nicole Holmes and Toni Johnson-Simpson is greatly appreciated. We thank Aditi Sinha, Nicole Hernandez, and Rawya Al-Jabari for their help conducting and coding the ACT sessions. We also want to thank Kathryn Marczyk and Shana Southard-Dobbs for their invaluable contributions to data collection. Lastly, we thank the members of the Murrell research team who helped to enter and clean the data or read drafts of materials.

Notes on contributors

Adriel Boals is an associate professor of psychology at the University of North Texas. His main interests include the effects of stress and trauma on psychological well-being and cognitive abilities.

Amy R. Murrell is an associate professor at the University of North Texas. Her primary research interests are in the contextual factors that underlie psychopathology or resiliency after trauma. She has studied Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as a means to investigate and manipulate such contextual factors since 2000.