Fear-potentiated startle and posttraumatic stress symptoms in urban police officers

We studied the effects of increasing threat conditions on self‐reported emotion, eyeblink electromyogram, and skin conductance responses to startling sounds in 55 police officers who endorsed a range of PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) symptoms. We found that contextual threat affected both phys...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of traumatic stress 2003-10, Vol.16 (5), p.471-479
Main Authors: Pole, Nnamdi, Neylan, Thomas C., Best, Suzanne R., Orr, Scott P., Marmar, Charles R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Anxiety disorders. Neuroses
Biological and medical sciences
Blinking - physiology
Electromyography
emotion
Emotions
fear
Fear - psychology
fear-potentiated acoustic startle
Female
Galvanic Skin Response
Humans
law enforcement
Male
Medical sciences
Police
police officers
Post-traumatic stress disorder
posttraumatic stress disorder
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
PTSD
Reflex, Startle
Reproducibility of Results
Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - etiology
Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - psychology
Urban Population
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We studied the effects of increasing threat conditions on self‐reported emotion, eyeblink electromyogram, and skin conductance responses to startling sounds in 55 police officers who endorsed a range of PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) symptoms. We found that contextual threat affected both physiologic and self‐reported emotional responses. Greater PTSD symptom severity was related to greater physiologic responses under the low and medium but not under the high threat condition. The relationship between PTSD symptoms and physiologic responses was neither explained by self‐reported emotional responses nor preexisting reported exaggerated startle symptoms. Our results emphasize the importance of contextual threat and suggest that laboratory measures of startle improve upon self‐reported exaggerated startle alone in indexing PTSD symptom severity in urban police officers.
ISSN:0894-9867
1573-6598
DOI:10.1023/A:1025758411370