Clinical, Educational & Health Psychology, University College London, UK.
Cognition. 2012 Aug;124(2):234-8. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.05.002. Epub 2012 Jun 1.
Flashbacks are involuntary, emotion-laden images experienced by individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The qualities of flashbacks could under certain circumstances lead to source memory errors. Participants with PTSD wrote a trauma narrative and reported the experience of flashbacks. They were later presented with stimuli from flashback and non-flashback parts of their narrative, mixed with foils from the narrative of another participant, and judged whether they belonged to their own narrative. They also reported whether stimuli elicited a flashback during this recognition test. Overall reporting a flashback at test was associated with significantly better recognition performance. Flashbacks were occasionally reported to foil stimuli, which were then likely to be wrongly attributed to the person's own narrative. This provides proof of concept of a cognitive mechanism that could potentially account for some cases of false trauma memories.
闪回是创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）个体经历的不由自主、充满情绪的图像。在某些情况下，闪回的特征可能导致源记忆错误。PTSD 患者撰写创伤叙述，并报告闪回的体验。随后，他们会看到来自叙述的闪回和非闪回部分的刺激，以及来自另一名参与者叙述的干扰项，并判断这些刺激是否属于自己的叙述。他们还报告在这个识别测试中，刺激是否引起了闪回。总的来说，在测试中报告闪回与显著更好的识别表现相关。偶尔会报告闪回干扰刺激，这些刺激随后很可能被错误地归因于该人的自身叙述。这为一种认知机制提供了概念证明，该机制可能解释一些虚假创伤记忆的案例。
