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"Blanchette, Isabelle"
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Mothers’ psychopathology and their adult offspring’s cortisol level in a Rwandan sample
Background: Most studies on the influence of mothers’ trauma-related psychopathology on their offspring’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis functioning have been conducted in Western contexts. Furthermore, those studies have focused on the association between mothers’ post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and their offspring’s HPA axis functioning. More research is needed among African populations exposed to mass violence to mitigate the intergenerational transmission of trauma.Aim: To investigate the link between mothers’ PTSD and depression and their offspring’s basal cortisol level.Setting: This cross-sectional study was conducted in two provinces of Rwanda (Kigali City and the Southern Province) among families of survivors of the 1994 genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi.Methods: A total of 45 dyads of mothers and their adult offspring were recruited. They answered questionnaires that measured sociodemographic characteristics, trauma exposure, PTSD and depression symptoms. Participants also provided saliva samples for cortisol extraction.Results: Mothers’ depression was negatively associated with their offspring’s overall basal cortisol level. There was no link between mothers’ PTSD and their offspring’s overall basal cortisol level. The relationship between the offspring’s overall basal cortisol level and their own psychopathology was not significant.Conclusion: These preliminary findings showed an HPA axis disruption among offspring of mass violence-exposed and depressed mothers.Contribution: This study contributes to the literature by showing that depression is a relevant correlate of neuroendocrine functioning and should be investigated more consistently in research on the intergenerational consequences of trauma exposure.
Journal Article
Memory for neutral, emotional and trauma-related information in sexual abuse survivors
Previous studies have shown that trauma-exposed individuals, including survivors of sexual abuse, show inferior performance in episodic memory tasks compared to non-exposed controls. This, however, has mainly been tested using neutral content. Our goal in this study was to determine whether this relative impairment in episodic memory extends to generally emotional and trauma-related content. Twenty-seven sexual abuse survivors and 27 control women participated in the study. They listened to stories with three content types (neutral, generally emotional and trauma-related) and performed a free-recall task immediately and 30 minutes later. Sexual abuse survivors showed poorer recall of neutral material compared to control participants. Lower recall was also observed for generally emotional content. However, importantly, there was no difference between groups in the recall of trauma-related content. The main novel contribution of this study is the demonstration that verbal episodic memory is not impaired for non-autobiographical trauma-related content in sexual abuse survivors. We discuss how this could be explained by personal relevance and attentional capture.
Journal Article
Sexual Abuse Exposure Alters Early Processing of Emotional Words: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials
This study aimed to compare the time course of emotional information processing between trauma-exposed and control participants, using electrophysiological measures. We conceived an emotional Stroop task with two types of words: trauma-related emotional words and neutral words. We assessed the evoked cerebral responses of sexual abuse victims without post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and no abuse participants. We focused particularly on an early wave (C1/P1), the N2pc, and the P3b. Our main result indicated an early effect (55-165 ms) of emotionality, which varied between non-exposed participants and sexual abuse victims. This suggests that potentially traumatic experiences modulate early processing of emotional information. Our findings showing neurobiological alterations in sexual abuse victims (without PTSD) suggest that exposure to highly emotional events has an important impact on neurocognitive function even in the absence of psychopathology.
Journal Article
Validation of a Trauma Film: Emotional Responses, Intrusive Memories and Concept Activations
Background
Trauma films are often used as analogues of potentially traumatic events in experimental research to study trauma exposure under controlled conditions. However, those kinds of trauma films are rarely validated through comparison with neutral films. Also, previous trauma-analogue studies have mainly used self-report measures to assess memory of the film, which are subject to demand characteristics. The objective of this study was to validate the effects of a trauma film compared to a neutral-control film on emotional responses and intrusive memories. We also introduced a novel method of assessing implicit memory, by measuring concept activation in memory.
Methods
Twenty-two participants watched a trauma film, and 17 participants watched a neutral film. They reported their affective state and intrusions on a 5-minute period, and then over the 6 following days. The activation of concepts was tested with a lexical decision task: negative and neutral targets (words and non-words) related and unrelated to the films were presented, and participants had to judge their lexicality.
Results
The trauma film increased negative affect and elicited more frequent intrusions than the neutral film. The number of immediate intrusions was strongly correlated with those reported over 6 days. The trauma film elicited faster responses on the film-related words than the neutral film, revealing a greater activation of concepts in memory.
Conclusion
Results show that this trauma film can be an effective experimental method to induce emotional responses and intrusive memories. The lexical decision task seems to be a promising method to further investigate the role of implicit concepts activation in the consequences of trauma exposure.
Journal Article
Understanding the structure of autobiographical memories: A study of trauma memories from the 1994 Rwandan genocide
How do we remember traumatic events, and are these memories different in individuals who experience post-traumatic stress? Some evidence suggests that traumatic events are mnemonically enhanced, or include more episodic detail, relative to other types of memories. Simultaneously, individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have more non-episodic details in all of their memories, a pattern hypothesized to result from impairment in executive function. Here, we explore these questions in a unique population that experienced severely traumatic events more than 20 years ago – individuals who lived through the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Participants recalled events from the genocide, negative events unrelated to the genocide, neutral events, and positive events. We used the Autobiographical Interview method to label memory details as episodic or non-episodic. We found that memories from the genocide showed robust mnemonic enhancement, with more episodic than non-episodic details, and contained more details overall than any other memory type. This pattern was not impacted by post-traumatic stress. Overall, this study provides evidence that traumatic events create vivid long-lasting episodic memories, in this case even more than 20 years later.
Journal Article
Can threat detection be enhanced using processing strategies by police trainees and officers?
The ability to detect threatening stimuli is an important skill for police officers. No research has yet examined whether implementing different information processing strategies can improve threat detection in police officers and police trainees. The first aim of our study was to compare the effect of strategies accentuating the processing of the emotional or the semantic dimension of stimuli on attention towards threatening and neutral information. The second aim was to consider the impact of PTSD symptoms on threat detection, as a function of processing strategies, in police officers and trainees. In a cueing paradigm, participants had to respond to a target that was presented following a threatening or neutral cue. Participants then answered a question, known beforehand, concerning the cue. The question was used to induce a more emotional or semantic processing strategy. Results showed that when the processing strategy was emotional, police trainees and officers were faster to detect the target when it followed a threatening cue, compared to a neutral cue, independently of its spatial location. This was not the case when the processing strategy was semantic. This study shows that induced processing strategies can influence attentional mechanisms related to threat detection in police trainees and police officers.
Journal Article
The effect of emotion on interpretation and logic in a conditional reasoning task
The effect of emotional content on logical reasoning is explored in three experiments. Theparticipants completed a conditional reasoning task (If p, then q) with emotional and neutral contents. In Experiment 1, existing emotional and neutral words were used. The emotional value of initially neutral words was experimentally manipulated in Experiments 1B and 2, using classical conditioning. In all experiments, participants were less likely to provide normatively correct answers when reasoning about emotional stimuli, compared with neutral stimuli. This was true for both negative (Experiments 1B and 2) and positive contents (Experiment 2). The participants' interpretations of the conditional statements were also measured (perceived sufficiency, necessity, causality, and plausibility). The results showed the expected relationship between interpretation and reasoning. However, emotion did not affect interpretation. Emotional and neutral conditional statements were interpreted similarly. The results are discussed in light of current models of emotion and reasoning.
Journal Article
Visual exploration in adults: Habituation, mere exposure, or optimal level of arousal?
Exploration is one of the most powerful behaviours that drive learning from infancy to adulthood. The aim of the current study was to examine the role of novelty and subjective preference in visual exploration. To do this, we combined a visual exploration task with a subjective evaluation task, presenting novel and familiar pictures. The first goal was to ascertain whether, as demonstrated in babies, short habituation favors visual exploration of familiarity, whereas longer habituation leads to an exploration of novelty. The second goal was to evaluate the influence of familiarization on participants’ subjective evaluation of the stimuli. When presented with novel and very familiar stimuli, participants explored the novel stimuli more. In line with the optimal-level of arousal model, participants showed more positive evaluations of the semi-familiar stimuli compared with very familiar or very novel ones.
Journal Article