Interruption and bizarreness effects in the recall of script-based text

Cultural Scripts of Traumatic Stress: Outline, Illustrations, and Research Opportunities

As clinical-psychological scientists and practitioners increasingly work with diverse populations of traumatized people, it becomes increasingly important to attend to cultural models that influence the ways in which people understand and describe their responses to trauma. This paper focuses on potential uses of the concept of cultural script in this domain. Originally described by cognitive psychologists in the 1980s, scripts refer to specific behavioral and experiential sequences of elements such as thoughts, memories, attention patterns, bodily sensations, sleep abnormalities, emotions and affective expressions, motivation, coping attempts, and ritualized behaviors that are relevant to posttraumatic adjustment. We differentiate between experiences of traumatic stress that are scripted (e.g., cultural explanations are available) versus unscripted. Further characteristics such as script tracks, the effect of script interruptions, and contextual fit of scripts with other cultural models are also described. We consider examples of traumatic stress associated with war and organized, sexualized violence from "Western" and "non-Western" world regions. The concluding part of this review describes a number of possibilities for methodological approaches to assessment of cultural scripts. Capturing central elements of the script(s) of trauma would aid psychological researchers and clinicians in understanding the experiences of trauma in cultural context, which could ultimately lead to better clinical service opportunities worldwide.

The role of emotion on the recall of central and peripheral information from script-based text

In three experiments, script-based stories were used to provide thematic emotion. Consistent with past research expressing emotion thematically, emotion aided recall of both central and peripheral information. However, emotion had to be directly associated with the central or peripheral information, and emotion only facilitated memory for peripheral information when peripheral information alone was associated with the emotion. Emotion did not aid overall recall of stories. Positive and negative emotions were generally better recalled when they were incongruent with the information they were associated with, such as a positive emotion associated with an interruptive action. These results provide evidence that thematically expressed, low arousal emotion can have facilitative effects on memory. Implications for the role of emotion on memory are discussed.