Heterogeneity of defensive responses after exposure to trauma: blunted autonomic reactivity in response to startling sounds

Research on threat responses, particularly among trauma-exposed individuals, has traditionally focused on increased autonomic arousal and reactivity. However, clinical features associated with trauma exposure, such as dissociation (e.g., shutting down or 'spacing out') manifest as the opposite pattern: non-reactivity and blunted arousal. These clinical features suggest that the possibility of...

Heterogeneous Patterns of Stress over the Four Years of College: Associations with Anxious Attachment and Ego-Resiliency

OBJECTIVES: A growing body of literature suggests that college students display alarming rates of psychological distress. However, studies of responses to significant life stressors in other contexts have found that people respond in heterogeneous ways and that attachment style and ego-resiliency mitigate the effects of stressors on mental health. METHOD: Individual differences in distress among...

How prevalent is resilience following sexual assault?: comment on steenkamp et Al. (2012)

Steenkamp, Dickstein, Salters-Pedneault, Hofmann, and Litz (2012) analyzed latent trajectories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms on data obtained in the early months following a single-incident sexual assault. In contrast to previous studies of potentially traumatic events, they did not observe a trajectory of minimal symptoms or resilience, which they argued occurred because...

Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences

Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences (EBS) publishes manuscripts that advance the study of human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, with an emphasis on work that integrates evolutionary theory with other approaches and perspectives from across the behavioral sciences, including the range of subdisciplines within psychology as well as the social sciences (e.g., sociology, political science,...

Finalizing PTSD in DSM-5: Getting Here From There and Where to Go Next

The process that resulted in the diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed., DSM-5, American Psychiatric Association, 2013) was empirically based and rigorous. There was a high threshold for any changes in any DSM-IV diagnostic criterion. The process is described in this article. The rationale is presented...

Decision

Decision is a multidisciplinary research journal focused on a theoretical understanding of neural, cognitive, social, and economic aspects of human judgment and decision-making behavior.Decision publishes articles on all areas related to judgment and decision-making research including probabilistic inference, prediction, evaluation, choice, decisions under risk or uncertainty, and economic games...

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