Posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and positive affect: Individual and multilevel dynamic networks.

OBJECTIVE: Network analysis aims to identify links between symptoms that may serve to maintain one other; the current study uses network analysis to identify relationships between posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms as they unfold over time within individuals. We also examine whether positive affect (PA) may buffer subsequent PTSD symptoms in daily life and compare single individual networks to the average within-person effects. METHOD: Fifty-two individuals (76.9% female; 84.6% white) who had experienced a Criterion A trauma participated in the 2-week study and reported their PA and PTSD symptom levels five times a day at 2-hr intervals (M surveys completed = 60.4). Multilevel and regularized individual-only network models were generated using vector autoregression. RESULTS: Feeling distant from others was the PTSD symptom most closely connected to lower PA; it was also the most connected to other PTSD symptoms. PA items did not predict lower PTSD at the next time point, except for one bidirectional relationship. Feeling on edge was the symptom with the largest magnitude of relationships to other symptoms in the multilevel network, but this was only reflected in 38.5% of the individual networks. Three example individual networks are described and discussed for clinical implications. CONCLUSIONS: We did not find evidence to support the hypothesis that PA buffers PTSD symptom severity on the time scale assessed (2 hr). Feeling distant from others was a bridge between lower PA and PTSD symptoms and may indicate social support as an important factor in treating trauma survivors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Self-triggering: Does function determine pathogenesis?

OBJECTIVE: Research suggests six motives for exposing oneself to painful reminders of a trauma outside of a therapeutic context (self-triggering). These include provoking arousal, escaping emotional numbness, self-punishment, controlling symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), making meaning of one's trauma, and generating an experience that matches one's emotions. The goal of the current study is to examine if these motives subserve broader functions of self-triggering behavior that differentially relate to PTSD symptoms. METHOD: We conducted an exploratory factor analysis on the self-reported reasons for self-triggering collected from 360 adults who endorsed lifetime self-triggering. We then theorized higher-order factors and tested both their fit to the data with a confirmatory factor analysis and whether they moderated the relationship between self-triggering and PTSD symptoms. RESULTS: We found that five factors best described the reasons for self-triggering. We theorized one higher-order factor (function) of "emotional modification" that encompasses sensation-seeking, antinumbing, self-punishment, and affect-matching. The "meaning-making" function consists of efforts to make meaning of one's trauma. This structure fit the data well in a confirmatory factor analysis. Self-triggering frequency no longer predicted symptom severity when meaning-making was highly endorsed as a function of self-triggering. Emotional modification did not affect this relationship. CONCLUSIONS: Generalizability may be limited by the sample's high symptom levels, limited demographic diversity, and high proportion of interpersonal trauma. These findings suggest that the degree to which individuals self-trigger to make meaning of trauma may affect how pathogenic the behavior is, underscoring the clinical importance of identifying the function of patients' self-triggering. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychometric properties of the late positive potential in adult females.

The late positive potential (LPP) is an event related potential (ERP) that has been used to study the processing of emotional stimuli and has been proposed as a biomarker for depression. However, to relate the LPP to trait-like individual differences it is important to first determine its psychometric properties. The current study assessed the reliability and internal consistency of the LPP in a large adult sample of women. We assessed the LPP following pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral images at baseline (n = 266) and approximately eight weeks later (n = 193). The LPP demonstrated good test-retest reliability and good-to-excellent internal consistency at both time points. The LPP response was not associated with concurrent depressive symptoms. These findings suggest the LPP is a relatively stable and reliable measure of emotional processing, but further research with larger samples and more elevated depression scores may be needed in order to clarify the associations between depression and LPP.