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The Failure of Automatic Emotion Regulation of PTSD in Priming Paradigm

Abstract

Both automatic and controlled processes can be observed in sequence by manipulating the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) using the priming paradigm. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of activating an episodic trauma memory on self-regulation by using the naming task, a type of semantic and emotional priming task. In the naming task, the primed stimuli were three types of words including specific foreign, specific domestic and general trauma events, and the target stimuli were three kinds of emotion words classified by the levels of affective valence and activation. Three experiments were carried out. The participants in Experiment 1 (n=60) with 150ms SOA and Experiment 2 (n=57) with 1,000 ms SOA were college students. The participants in Experiment 3 (n=57), which used both 150 ms and 1,000 ms SOAs, were patients being treated at psychiatric outpatient clinics after exposure to traumatic events. The results showed that the reaction times in the non-clinical group were more delayed (i.e., reversed priming effect) when using the domestic (e.g., Sewol ferry) or general (e.g., violence) trauma events as primed stimuli and the negative emotion words of high-arousal (e.g., fear or anger) as target stimuli when compared to the other experimental conditions. But, the clinical group exposed to the 1,000 ms SOA condition showed facilitation and reversed priming effects when being presented with negative emotion words of high-arousal as target stimuli after priming with domestic and foreign traumatic events, respectively. These results were discussed in terms of the autobiographical memory and automatic emotion regulation seen in posttraumatic stress disorder. Limitations of this study and suggestions for further research were also discussed.

keywords
점화효과, 정서 조절, 명명과제, 자동적 처리, 외상후 스트레스 장애, priming effect, emotion regulation, naming task, automatic processing, PTSD

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