Citation

McNally RJ, Clancy SA, Schacter DL, Pitman RK. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 2000; 109(3): 355-359.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. rjm@wjh.harvard.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 2000, American Psychological Association)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

11016105

Abstract

Psychologically traumatized people exhibit delayed color naming of trauma words in the emotional Stroop task. Four groups of participants were asked to color name positive words, neutral words, and trauma words; these groups included 15 women who believed that they harbored repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), 13 women who reported recovered memories of CSA, 15 women who had never forgotten their CSA, and 12 women who had never been abused. Repressed-memory participants exhibited patterns of interference indistinguishable from those of the nonabused control group participants. Irrespective of group membership, the severity of self-reported posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms was the only significant predictor of trauma-related interference, r(48) = .30, p < .05.

Language: en