Open AccessAssessing the coherence of narratives of traumatic events with latent semantic analysis.
Author(s) -
Scott R. Vrana,
Rose S Bono,
Andrea König,
Gabriella C Scalzo
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
psychological trauma
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.059
H-Index - 48
eISSN - 1942-9681
pISSN - 1942-969X
DOI - 10.1037/tra0000415
Subject(s) - narrative , coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) , autobiographical memory , psychology , traumatic memories , cognitive psychology , psycinfo , representation (politics) , meaning (existential) , linguistics , recall , psychotherapist , medline , quantum mechanics , philosophy , physics , politics , political science , law
Memories of traumatic events are thought to be less coherent than memories for nontraumatic events, and expressive writing about traumatic events may help create more organized, coherent memories. Investigations of traumatic memories have been hampered by limitations in conceptualizing and measuring memory organization and coherence. The objective of this investigation was to compare the coherence of written narratives of trauma and neutral memories and examine changes in coherence of trauma narratives as a function of repeated expressive writing about the trauma using an atheoretical, computational method for assessing the coherence of text.