Automatic and strategic activation and inhibition of threat-relevant information in posttraumatic stress disorder

Trauma victims with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may interpret ambiguous information as threatening and have difficulties inhibiting this information. To test these hypotheses, we used a modification of Gernsbacher, Varner, and Faust's homograph paradigm in traumatized individuals with and without PTSD (M. A. Gernsbacher, K. R. Varner, & M. E. Faust, 1990). We hypothesized that having PTSD would be related to poor inhibition of the threat-relevant meanings of homographs (words with two meanings, e. g., mug). Consistent with this hypothesis, our results revealed that traumatized individuals with PTSD showed less inhibition of the threat meanings of homographs than did traumatized individuals without PTSD. These findings are consistent with a delayed activation model of information processing bias in PTSD.