Have you ever wondered whether the effects of trauma on memory are the same across all cultures?
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| Image by: Dierk Schaefer |
CSEL Trustee Chris Brewin, Associate Researcher Belinda Graham and Jane Herlihy have recently published a new study in the Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, to investigate the link between PTSD and overgeneral memory in refugees and asylum seekers from 18 different countries. Click here to access the full paper (£), here for a pre-print copy of the paper, or read through our digest below.
Overgeneral memory (OGM) is a phenomenon whereby a person recalls general memories of their personal experiences, or categories of events, rather than specific memories for events that happened on a particular day. Scientists’ current understanding of OGM based on studies with people from Western countries is that OGM is associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, many professionals wonder whether these findings are still valid for non-Western populations, from which refugees and asylum seekers in the UK almost always originate. CSEL’s researchers set out to investigate whether there was still an association between OGM and PTSD in a sample of people from 18 countries in Africa, South America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
They found that even in this non-Western group, participants with PTSD and depression had more difficulty retrieving specific memories in response to cues than those not suffering PTSD; that is, they still exhibited OGM. These findings support the relevance of the findings of previous studies on PTSD and OGM to non-Western groups. This research also lends further support to the hypothesis that people with PTSD might be less likely to be believed in refugee status determination processes due to the assumption that a credible account is rich in specific details, making it more difficult for them to be granted protection from persecution. It’s worth noting that although the researchers set out to investigate the association between OGM and PTSD in particular, the association found in this study is between PTSD and depression, because the researchers were unable to disentangle the effects of the two.
