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Post-traumatic growth: conceptual foundations and empirical evidence

29 important questions on Post-traumatic growth: conceptual foundations and empirical evidence

What are the words trauma, crisis and highly stressful life events used for?

As synonymous to describe sets of circumstances that represent significant challenges to individuals' ways of understanding the world and their place in it

How can posttraumatic growth manifest itself? (6)

1. Increased appreciation for life in general
2. More meaningful interpersonal relationships
3. Increased sense of personal strength
4. Changes priorities
5. Richer existential and spiritual life
6. Social transformations (group identity)

What types of trauma have shown to potentially act as catalysts for posttraumatic growth? (11)

1. Negative events in college students
2. Bereavement
3. Rheumatoid arthritis
4. HIV infection
5. Cancer
6. Bone marrow transplantation
7. Heart attacks
8. Assault and sexual abuse
9. Combat
10. Refugee experiences
11. Being taken hostage

How can posttraumatic growth be defined?

As a change in people that goes beyond an ability to resist and not be damaged by highly stressful circumstances, involving a movement beyond pre-trauma levels of adaption, thus possessing a quality of transformation or a qualitative change in fuctioning

Why will people with other dimensions of coping capacity likely report little posttraumatic growth?

Because their capacities allow them to be less challenged by trauma, while the trauma is what is crucial for growth

How is posttraumatic growth likely to be related to physiological measures?

1. Higher levels of growth seem to be associated with lower levels of psychological distress (others: no significant relation)
2. Posttraumatic growth and distress are separate dimensions and growth experiences do not put an end to distress

How can the failure of finding a negative relationship between growth and distress be explained?

Because some people reporting growth deny negative aspects of their experiences

What are other routes to growth? (2)

1. Growth can also occur where there is no trauma, albeit at lower levels and in a more gradual manner
2. Positive experiences may have similar effects, especially if they are extraordinary enough to challenge schemas

What are the negative psychological consequences of highly traumatic events? (4)

1. Distressing emotions (sadness, depression, guilt, anger, and general irritability)
2. Distressing and sometimes dysfunctional patterns of thinking (disbelief and experience of psychological numbness, or intruding thoughts and images)
3. Physical reactions (prolonged activation of bodily systems experienced in the form of fatigue, muscle tension and aches, gastric symptoms, and general physical discomfort)
4. Increased risk of developing psychiatric problems

Why is it important to focus on research regarding the positive aspects of the struggle with trauma?

Because the evidence is high that positive growth follows from difficult circumstances, but little is known about the processes, concomitant, and consequences of the experience of growth

What does the term 'assumptive world' mean?

People rely on a general set of beliefs and assumptions about the world, that guide their actions, help them understand the causes and reasons for what happens, and can provide them with a general sense of meaning and purpose

How do major life crises challenge people's assumptive world?

They can present major challenges to the person's understanding of the world, including beliefs about the benevolence, predictability, and controllability of the world

What does cognitive rebuilding mean?

It is a process that occurs after the metaphorical earthquake and produces schemas that incorporate the trauma and possible events in the future that are more resistant to being shattered. The results of this process are experienced as growth

What influence does the affective component of psychological processing have?

Psychological processing has a highly emotional element to it, which makes the experience transformative.

How do posttraumatic growth and the residual distress of trauma go together?

Posttraumatic growth is likely a consequence of attempts at psychological survival, which can coexist with the residual distress of the trauma

What are the domains of posttraumatic growth? (5)

1. Greater appreciation of life and a changed sense of priorities
2. Warmer, more intimate relationships with others
3. Greater sense of personal strengths and vulnerabilities
4. Recognition of new possibilities or paths of one's life
5. Spiritual development

What are the main challenges caused by the occurrence of seismic events? (3)

1. Management of emotional distress
2. Fundamental schemas: beliefs & goals
3. Life narrative

What pathways does rumination set into motion? (2)

1. Pathway of self-disclosure enhances social support, which therefore helps to work towards the end goals
2. Rumination leads to the reduction of emotional distress and promotes the management of automatic rumination and disengagement from goals, that helps to work towards the end goals

What are the 'end goals' of the process of posttraumatic growth that lead to posttraumatic growth? (3)

1. More deliberate rumination
2. Schema change
3. Narrative development

What is the effect of different varieties of trauma on different levels of posttraumatic growth?

1. The events must be challenging enough to the assumptive world to set the cognitive processing into motion
2. Different events have been related to different levels of reported growth on posttraumatic growth

What personality characteristics are related to PTG scores? (3)

1. Extraversion
2. Openness to experience
2. Optimism (perhaps through influence on cognitive processing)

What is known about the timing of cognitive processing on the effect of it?

At early stages of response to trauma, cognitive processing is more likely to be automatic and, if effective, leads to disengagement from previous goals and assumptions as it becomes clear that the old way of living is no longer appropriate in radically changes circumstances

What are the effects of support and disclosure in the face of traumatic events? (2)

1. Supportive others can provide a way to craft narratives about the changes that have occurred
2. Revealing emotional aspects of the events can result in increased intimacy

Why are narratives so important in the face of traumatic events?

Their development forces survivors to confront questions of meaning and how it can be reconstructed

What is the effect of persistence on posttraumatic growth?

It is associated with higher levels of posttraumatic growth compared to people with little self-confidence in coping and giving up

What is the effect of blocking self-disclosure of intrusive thoughts?

This produces a strong relationship between these thoughts and depression

What is known about the effect of self-disclosure and support on posttraumatic growth? (2)

1. Cognitive processing is aided by self-disclosure in supportive social environments
2. When support remains stable and consistent over time, it may play a strong role in the development of posttraumatic growth

In what way does posttraumatic growth have common foundations with the ''fundamental pragmatics of life''?

People who have faced major challenges may also develop the ability to balance reflection and action, weigh the known and unknowns of life, be better able to accept some of the paradoxes of life, and more openly and satisfactorily address the fundamental questions of human existence

How are ongoing and interactive processes associated with posttraumatic growth?

A pattern of mutual influences unfolds over time.

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Positive Clinical Psychology

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