Cognitive flexibility and coping style in youth with post-traumatic stress complaints

Abstract

Background Experiencing stressful life-events is a risk factor for the development of a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), this may influence the structure and functions of brain areas and thereby possible also cognitive functions like cognitive flexibility. Coping style is also of interest in consequences of traumatization. Hypothesis The expectation based on previous research, was that adolescents with high post-traumatic stress (PTS) complaints would be less cognitive flexible than adolescents with low PTS complaints. The second expectation was that adolescents with high PTS complaints were more inclined to apply an emotion-focused coping than people with low PTS complaints and people with low PTS complaints were more inclined to apply a problem-focused coping than people with high PTS complaints. Method The achievements of adolescents (n = 74) in the Specialist Mental Healthcare Institutions of GGZ Centraal Fornhese, with high and with low PTS complaints on the cognitive test measuring cognitive flexibility (ANT:SSV) were investigated. Also the use of different coping styles was investigated for the above mentioned groups. Results No statistic significant difference was found in cognitive flexibility between adolescents with high and low PTS complaints. A statistic significant difference was found in coping style used after experiencing a negative or traumatic event for the high and low PTS complaints groups. Conclusion This investigation suggests that there is no difference between adolescents with high and low PTS complaints on cognitive flexibility. Besides, it suggests that there is a difference between adolescents with high and low PTS complaints for coping style used. Adolescents with high PTS complaints were more inclined to use an emotion-focused coping style and adolescents with low PTS complaints were more inclined to use a problem-focused coping style. Main limitation in this study was the fact that there was no healthy control group.