College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia.
College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia; Flinders University Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia.
J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry. 2023 Dec;81:101889. doi: 10.1016/j.jbtep.2023.101889. Epub 2023 Jun 12.
Research shows that people can lack meta-awareness (i.e., being explicitly aware) of their trauma-related thoughts, which impacts our understanding of re-experiencing symptoms, a key symptom type in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), assessed through self-report. This preliminarily study explored differences between (meta-)aware and unaware intrusion characteristics to understand why some intrusions are not immediately apparent to individuals.
Trauma-exposed participants (N = 78) were recruited from online crowd-sourcing platforms to complete an online meta-awareness task. During a reading task, participants were intermittently probed to index the occurrence of unreported (i.e., unaware) trauma-related intrusions. Once participants indicated trauma-related intrusions were present, they then completed a questionnaire that indexed intrusion characteristics.
Although unaware intrusions did occur in a subset of the sample, there were no fundamental differences between aware and unaware intrusions in terms of modality of experience (imagery vs. non-imagery), meaningfulness, accessibility, or other characteristics (e.g., vividness).
There was potential for lower participant engagement and attention due to the online delivery of the meta-awareness task, which may have minimized meta-awareness failure. Future research could consider using a continuous measure to index levels of meta-awareness. In addition, recruiting clinical samples (e.g., individuals with PTSD) who typically experience multiple daily intrusions would allow generalizability of the current findings to be tested.
Our findings from this preliminary study suggest that unaware and aware intrusions show more commonality than not in their characteristics, with further research required to improve our understanding of the mechanisms leading to meta-awareness or lack of in PTSD.
研究表明，人们可能缺乏对创伤相关思维的元意识（即明确意识到），这影响了我们对再体验症状的理解，再体验症状是创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）的一种主要症状类型，通过自我报告进行评估。本初步研究探讨了有意识和无意识侵入特征之间的差异，以了解为什么有些侵入对个体来说并不明显。
创伤暴露参与者（N=78）从在线众包平台招募，完成在线元意识任务。在阅读任务中，参与者会间歇性地被探测，以记录未报告的（即无意识的）创伤相关侵入。一旦参与者表示存在创伤相关侵入，他们就会完成一份问卷，记录侵入特征。
尽管在样本的一部分中确实发生了无意识侵入，但在体验方式（意象与非意象）、意义、可及性或其他特征（如生动性）方面，有意识和无意识侵入之间没有根本区别。
由于元意识任务是在线进行的，因此参与者可能会出现较低的参与度和注意力，这可能会最小化元意识失败。未来的研究可以考虑使用连续测量来标记元意识水平。此外，招募经常经历多次日常侵入的临床样本（例如 PTSD 患者）可以检验当前发现的普遍性。
我们这项初步研究的结果表明，有意识和无意识侵入在其特征上具有更多的共同性，需要进一步研究以提高我们对导致 PTSD 中元意识或缺乏元意识的机制的理解。
