Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is marked by avoidance, arousal, re-experiencing, and negative mood and cognition. To date, these symptoms are assessed using self-report measures (e.g., the PCL-5) and clinician administered assessments (e.g., the CAPS-5). While these are the present gold-standard assessments for PTSD, they still are prone to bias on behalf of both the administrator and the patient. Presently, there is evidence that individuals with PTSD perform differently than individuals without PTSD on certain cognitive tasks that measure attention bias and avoidance behaviors. As such, creating a battery of these tasks may be a viable route for objectively measuring PTSD. In an effort to provide preliminary evidence for such a battery, we used three cognitive assessments [the Emotional Stroop Task (EST), the Visual Search Task (VST), and the Approach Avoidance Task (AAT)] to assess cognitive performance in veterans with PTSD, and veterans and civilians without PTSD. We hypothesized that veterans with PTSD would perform worse than the other groups (as measured by reaction times and accuracy scores) following the presentation of combat-related stimuli compared to negative and positive stimuli. The results indicated that veterans with PTSD were generally slower across all conditions in the EST, had lower accuracy scores on the VST, and were slower in the combat condition compared to the other control groups in the AAT. This study provides preliminary support for the hypothesis that a battery of cognitive tasks may be an effective tool for objectively identifying PTSD. Furthermore, we discuss important methodological ways in which future studies could improve the sensitivity of these tasks.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd2023-1373 |
| Date | 01 January 2024 |
| Creators | O'Dell, Kathryn |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024 |
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