Cottencin O, Vaiva G, Huron C, Devos P, Ducrocq F, Jouvent R, Goudemand M, Thomas P
Department of Psychiatry, FONTAN Hospital, University of Lille II, School of Medicine, Rue Verhaeghe, 59037 Lille Cedex, France.
J Psychiatr Res. 2006 Feb;40(1):70-80. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2005.04.001.
The most characteristic feature of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the reexperiencing syndrome. The patient's memory seems to be fixed on the traumatic event, which may be due to disturbance of the autobiographic memory. To retrieve memories, others have to be inhibited. These inhibition mechanisms have been studied using the Directed Forgetting Paradigm, which measures the capacity to forget recently processed information and to retain the relevant information. Our hypothesis is that during PTSD, the memory is saturated with traumatic memories, so that the patients are no longer able to use the inhibitory processes. Therefore, during a Directed Forgetting Task (DFT) in which words "to remember" and words "to forget" are given, PTSD patients cannot inhibit the words "to forget", and so recall more words than the controls. We studied 30 patients with PTSD and compared them with 30 healthy controls, using DFT. The results show that the patients remembered significantly fewer words overall, and fewer of the words "to remember" than the controls, both for immediate and final recall. Our results are in favor of a reduction in directed forgetting in patients suffering from PTSD, resulting in difficulty in inhibiting irrelevant information from the overall information. There seems to be a deficit in the inhibitory processes in the memory in PTSD.
创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）最典型的特征是重现综合征。患者的记忆似乎固定在了创伤事件上，这可能是由于自传体记忆受到了干扰。为了检索记忆，其他记忆必须被抑制。人们使用定向遗忘范式对这些抑制机制进行了研究，该范式测量遗忘最近处理信息并保留相关信息的能力。我们的假设是，在创伤后应激障碍期间，记忆中充斥着创伤性记忆，以至于患者不再能够运用抑制过程。因此，在一个给出“记住”和“忘记”单词的定向遗忘任务（DFT）中，创伤后应激障碍患者无法抑制“忘记”的单词，所以比对照组回忆起更多的单词。我们使用定向遗忘任务研究了30名创伤后应激障碍患者，并将他们与30名健康对照者进行了比较。结果显示，无论是即时回忆还是最终回忆，患者总体上记住的单词显著少于对照组，记住的“记住”类单词也少于对照组。我们的结果支持创伤后应激障碍患者定向遗忘能力下降的观点，这导致他们难以从整体信息中抑制无关信息。创伤后应激障碍患者的记忆抑制过程似乎存在缺陷。
