Role of morality in the experience of guilt and shame within the armed forces.

OBJECTIVE: Despite advances in our understanding of mental health issues among military forces, a large proportion of military personnel continue to exhibit deployment-related psychological issues. Recent work has identified symptoms of guilt and shame related to moral injury as contributing significantly to combat-related mental health issues. This systematic scoping review explores the association between morality and symptoms of guilt and shame within military forces. METHOD: A search of the literature pertaining to guilt, shame and morality within military samples was conducted. RESULTS: Nineteen articles were selected for review. There is strong evidence linking exposure to and the perceived perpetration of moral transgressions with experiences of guilt and shame. Critically, symptoms of guilt and shame were related to adverse mental health outcomes, particularly the onset of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). No studies have explored moral judgment in conjunction with assessments of guilt or moral injury. CONCLUSION: These findings have important implications for the prevention and treatment of PTSD-related symptoms in military samples. By measuring moral judgment prior to deployment, it may be possible to predict the likelihood of incurring moral injuries and the development of associated symptoms. Early intervention programmes aimed at ameliorating guilt and shame are required to prevent the long-term development of deployment-related psychological distress.

Comprehension of affective prosody in women with post-traumatic stress disorder related to childhood abuse.

OBJECTIVE: Although deficits in memory and cognitive processing are evident in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), difficulties with social cognition and the impact of such difficulties on interpersonal functioning are poorly understood. Here, we examined the ability of women diagnosed with PTSD related to childhood abuse to discriminate affective prosody, a central component of social cognition. METHOD: Women with PTSD and healthy controls (HCs) completed two computer-based tasks assessing affective prosody: (i) recognition (categorizing foreign-language excerpts as angry, fearful, sad, or happy) and (ii) discrimination (identifying whether two excerpts played consecutively had the 'same' or 'different' emotion). The association of performance with symptom presentation, trauma history, and interpersonal functioning was also explored. RESULTS: Women with PTSD were slower than HCs at identifying happiness, sadness, and fear, but not anger in the speech excerpts. The presence of dissociative symptoms was related to reduced accuracy on the discrimination task. An increased severity of childhood trauma was associated with reduced accuracy on the discrimination task and with slower identification of emotional prosody. CONCLUSION: Exposure to childhood trauma is associated with long-term, atypical development in the interpretation of prosodic cues in speech. The findings have implications for the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

Name that tune: identifying popular recordings from brief excerpts.

We tested listeners' ability to identify brief excerpts from popular recordings. Listeners were required to match 200- or 100-msec excerpts with the song titles and artists. Performance was well above chance levels for 200-msec excerpts and poorer but still better than chance for 100-msec excerpts. Performance fell to chance levels when dynamic (time-varying) information was disrupted by playing the 100-msec excerpts backward and when high-frequency information was omitted from the 100-msec excerpts; performance was unaffected by the removal of low-frequency information. In sum, successful identification required the presence of dynamic, high-frequency spectral information.

A left-ear advantage for forced-choice judgements of melodic contour.

Listeners heard a sequence of five tones presented monaurally, and then made a forced-choice judgement about the sequence's contour (i.e., its pattern of upward and downward shifts in pitch between successive tones). The forced-choice method ensured that contoured judgements were independent of absolute-pitch an interval cues. Performance was better for sequences presented to the left ear (right hemisphere) than it was for sequences presented to the right ear (left hemisphere). This finding provides support for claims of a right-hemisphere bias for the processing of melodic contour.