Relationships between symptom profiles and memory in posttraumatic stress disorder.

Individuals with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) exhibit symptoms that affect their responsiveness to negative information. Specifically, hypervigilance heightens attention toward negative stimuli, whereas dissociation diverts attention away from it (Chiba et al., 2021), potentially leading to differential effects on memory encoding. This study investigated the influence of prominent hypervigilant and dissociative symptomatology on the memorization of negative emotional and contextual information in individuals exposed to the November 13, 2015, Paris terrorist attacks. Participants included individuals who had been exposed to the traumatic event (N = 99; 26 met full diagnostic criteria for PTSD, 28 showed subthreshold symptoms, and 45 had no symptoms) and non-exposed individuals (N = 65). They were asked to memorize faces displaying positive, neutral, and sad emotions, each paired with a word representing a profession, which served as a non-emotional contextual cue. This task was administered at two time points: ∼1.5 years and ∼3.5 years after the attacks. An emotion-profession recognition task was used, with an index measuring whether the emotional expression or the profession was better recognized. At the first time point, among exposed individuals, a relationship was observed between the prominence of hypervigilant or dissociative symptoms and enhanced recognition of either the emotional expression or the profession, respectively, in the context of sad facial expressions. Furthermore, changes in the prominence of these symptoms between the two time points were associated with shifts in the type of content that was better recognized. Collectively, these findings suggest the presence of a memory bias-either toward or away from emotional content-among individuals exposed to traumatic events, and particularly those with full diagnostic criteria for PTSD.