Integration and organization of trauma memories and posttraumatic symptoms

To examine the connection between trauma memory integration in personal memory, memory organization, and posttraumatic symptom severity, 47 trauma-exposed adults undertook an event-cuing task for their trauma memory and for a memorable nontraumatic negative event. Measures of integration provided by self-endorsement, rated by naïve judges, or calculated from the language of the memories, did not significantly predict posttraumatic stress disorder symptom severity after adjusting for age, time since the event, anxiety when disclosing, familiarity of the memory, and integration of nontrauma memory. Less use of casual connectives in the trauma memory narrative was associated with higher trauma-related avoidance (r = .33; p = .03), whereas self-rating of the trauma memory as disorganized was associated with higher overall symptom severity (r = .42; p = .006).