Distress Flashcards
What constitutes classification of PTSD?
Experience of a traumatic event such as an assault, near death or witnessing a death. Responses such as intense fear, hopelessness and/ or horror. To be classified, a person’s symptoms must be enduring, lasting for at least a month.
What is PTSD and its effects on AM?
Post traumatic stress disorder. Involves persistent intrusive thoughts and memories - uncontrolled direct retrieval of AMs.
What are the symptoms of PTSD?
Intrusive recurrent memories of the event; re-experience of the trauma as if the event was happening now; and acute distress at any reminder of the event. Highly sensory near episodic memories. Avoidance symptoms and amnesia of some or all of the event.
Theory of PTSD symptoms in relation to AM?
Conway- Intense emotions combined with the inability to control the situation create a fundamental challenge to the goal system of the working self. Lack of integration into AK might explain the amnesia for some parts of the event. Integration into AK also grants the cognitive system control over the memory. However, the WS might encode some aspects of the event in terms of the active WS goals so that these aspects appear to be encoded in great perceptual detail. These ‘hotspots’ which present themselves as intrusive memories possibly relate to the traumatic event in which the WS was most strongly challenged.
Why might amnesia arise for such a traumatic event?
From the inability to integrate the event into the AK base or because of inhibition by the current working self, preventing the memory from entering conscious awareness.
