ارتباط اختلال استرس پس از حادثه خود گزارش شده و علائم افسردگی و فاصله روانی از وقایع مثبت و منفی

ackground and Objectives Psychological distance refers to how far and how long ago an event feels to a person and how distant this person feels from their past self who experienced the event. Psychological distance is related to the recollective experience of the memory, but people with PTSD and depression remember positive and negative events differently. Whereas people with depression tend to have over-general memory, people with PTSD often relive traumatic experiences (i.e., intrusive memories). These findings suggest that people with PTSD might feel close to negative events and that people with depression might feel distant from positive events. Method In the present study, students (N = 103) reported their PTSD and depression symptoms and the psychological distance of highly positive and highly negative events. Results In line with previous work, participants generally felt close to positive experiences and distant from negative experiences. However, this study is the first one to show that participants with more depression symptoms feel psychologically distant from positive events and participants with more PTSD symptoms feel psychologically close to negative events. Limitations Although we did not establish whether the negative event was traumatic and whether the participants with many PTSD and depression symptoms suffered from these disorders, these limitations can be addressed in future research. Conclusions The results emphasize the important role of identifying with positive events in depression and they support the idea that PTSD is caused by the fact that the traumatic event has become central to a person’s life story.

People often remember personally experienced events as having a subjective distance different from their actual temporal distance. For example, the first time that a manuscript was accepted may have been several years ago, but it may feel like it happened only yesterday. Psychological distance refers to how far and how long ago an event feels to the person remembering the event and to the distance between the person’s current self and the past self who experienced the event (Ross & Wilson, 2002). In the present study, we examine whether measures of psychological distance are related to the symptomology of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. Psychological distance was initially examined in the context of self-esteem. People with high self-esteem tend to feel psychologically close to successes and other positive events and psychologically distant from failures and other negative events. This self-enhancement bias is generally weaker in people with low self-esteem, who often feel similarly close to favourable and unfavourable events (Demiray & Janssen, 2015; Ross & Wilson, 2002). By perceiving a past achievement as subjectively recent, people can continue to take credit for that success and thus feel good about their current self. In contrast, by perceiving a past shortcoming as subjectively distant, people can associate that failure with a past self and thus avoid any threat to their current self-regard (Peetz & Wilson, 2008). Similarly, people with high self-esteem tend to remember personal events about which they are proud with many visual and other sensory details and with strong feelings of reliving. Personal events about which they are ashamed tend to be remembered with fewer details and less reliving (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2008). This bias again tends to be weaker in people with low self-esteem, who often remember proud and shameful memories in similar ways (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2008). Taken together, these data suggest that psychological distance might be related to the vividness of the memories, with events remembered with strong experiences of reliving feeling psychologically close (e.g., Demiray & Janssen, 2015).

We first examined whether the age of the events, the length of the memory descriptions and the psychological distance of the events were related and whether valence and the order in which participants reported the events affected these characteristics (see Table 1). We found that positive events had happened more recently than negative events, t(102) = 2.88, p = .005, Cohen’s d = 0.284, 95% CIs [2.55, 13.86]. However, positive event descriptions were shorter (i.e., consisted of fewer characters) than negative event descriptions, t(102) = 4.26, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 0.420, 95% CIs [115.5, 317.0]. Finally, positive events felt psychologically closer than negative events, t(102) = 2.28, p = .025, Cohen’s d = 0.225, 95% CIs [0.36, 5.06]. Length of description was unrelated to the age of the event (r(206) = -.066, p = .348) or its psychological distance (r(206) = -.056, p = .421), but there was a weak correlation between the age of the event and psychological distance (r(206) = -.153, p = .028), indicating that events that happened more recently felt psychologically closer.