Adapting after adversity: Investigating the link between trauma exposure and memory control

What is it about?

Students enter college with a wide variety of life experience that helps shape and prepare them for the challenges they’ll encounter in school and beyond. Unfortunately, statistics suggest that many of those experiences could be considered traumatic, such as witnessing or experiencing major accidents or acts of violence. While these traumas are, without question, awful, we wondered whether previous exposure to certain types of trauma might actually enhance future resilience by essentially training individuals to more effectively cope with a range of unwanted memories.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The incidence of psychological trauma is far more widespread than many realize, with some estimates as high as 80% of the population. Although approximately 7% to 8% of people develop persistent PTSD in the wake of a major trauma, most people recover. This raises a fundamental question about the nature of this remission: Why do intrusions decline in these individuals? Does this remission reflect a passive forgetting that happens to all memories? Or might people’s early efforts to cope with intrusions help enhance mental functioning to handle new challenges? There’s currently a great deal of interest in determining what makes certain people more resilient than others and how we all might stand to improve our ability to face challenges. In the past, we have shown that most individuals can learn to prevent unwanted memories from coming to mind—at least within the confines of a controlled experiment. However, we have also noted a wide degree of individual differences in their effectiveness at doing so. The current work represents one attempt to identify how real-world experience might provide natural opportunities to practice this skill, perhaps going some distance in explaining why certain individuals are relatively better able to adapt in the face of new adversities.

Perspectives