ArticlePsychological trauma : theory, research, practice and policy2019
Assessing the coherence of narratives of traumatic events with latent semantic analysis.
Article in Psychological trauma : theory, research, practice and policy, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Personal Narratives in Trauma-Related Disorders: Contributions from a Metacognitive Approach and Treatment Considerations.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Natural language processing reveals differences in mental time travel at higher levels of self-efficacy.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Imaginal exposure processing during Concurrent Treatment of PTSD and Substance Use Disorders using Prolonged Exposure (COPE) therapy: Examination of linguistic markers of cohesiveness.Journal of traumatic stress · 2022Article
- Local Topic Mining for Reflective Medical Writing.AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science proceedings. AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science · 2020Article
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4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveMemories 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.
methodParticipants (N = 246) wrote 3 times about either their daily activities (neutral condition) or the most traumatic event of their lives. Latent semantic analysis, a method of calculating meaning from text based on semantic association between words, was used to assess narrative coherence as the average semantic association between contiguous sentences.
resultsNeutral narratives were more coherent than trauma narratives overall, but neutral narratives decreased whereas trauma narratives increased in coherence from the first to the final session.
conclusionsThese findings provide evidence that memories for trauma experiences are less coherent than neutral memories and suggest that writing helps to create a more coherent representation of a traumatic event, highlighting a potential mechanism for expressive writing's effects. Results demonstrate the utility of latent semantic analysis for examining coherence of memories of traumatic events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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