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Jennifer J Freyd

Publications and source records attributed to Jennifer J Freyd.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Research participants telling the truth about their lives: the ethics of asking and not asking about abuse.

Most discussions of the ethics of self-report research on abuse and interpersonal violence focus on the risks of asking participants about their experiences. An important element of the cost-benefit analysis--the costs of not asking about child abuse--has largely been ignored. Furthermore, little research has been conducted on the costs and benefits of child abuse research, leaving researchers to make decisions based on individual beliefs about such issues as the prevalence of abuse, the likelihood of disclosure, the effects of child abuse, and the ability of abuse survivors to give informed consent. The authors suggest that these beliefs tend to overemphasize survivors' vulnerability and ignore the costs of avoiding asking about abuse. In fact, these beliefs may reinforce societal avoidance of abuse and ultimately harm abuse survivors.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Self-reports of potentially traumatic experiences in an adult community sample: gender differences and test-retest stabilities of the items in a brief betrayal-trauma survey.

A new survey of potentially traumatic events was administered to a large community sample on two occasions, three years apart. In contrast to previous surveys, this one included separate items for events that involve mistreatment by someone close, mistreatment by someone not so close, and non-interpersonal events. For both kinds of interpersonal events, separate items focused on physical, sexual, and emotional types of potential abuse. For each event, respondents indicated the extent of their exposure both prior to and after age 18. This paper reports the prevalence of each of the various kinds of events in subsamples of women (N = 397) and men (N = 292) in both childhood and adulthood, and provides four alternative indices of test-retest stability for each of the event reports. Substantial differences between men and women were found for many of the reported events on both occasions. Specifically, far more women than men reported having experienced traumatic events perpetrated by someone close to them, whereas far more men than women reported having experienced traumatic events perpetrated by someone not close. Some of the implications of these gender interaction effects are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Beyond PTSD: an evolving relationship between trauma theory and family violence research.

During the past 20 years, we have learned how similarly harmful are experiences of terror, violence, and abuse, whether they occur on the combat field or at home. The field of family violence has gained much from the field of traumatic stress, and collaborations between these two previously separate fields have yielded important new answers, as well as new research questions. The field of traumatic stress is poised to integrate, more fully than in the past, a variety of aspects of trauma such as social betrayal, as well as outcomes of trauma such as depression, criminality, and physiological harm that go beyond posttraumatic stress. The field of family violence has much to offer in this process. We look forward to improved research designs that will further our knowledge of how trauma affects aspects of people's lives, including productivity, relationships, cognition, and emotions, in negative and positive ways.

Cultural Characteristics↗
PubMed2005

Betrayal trauma: relationship to physical health, psychological distress, and a written disclosure intervention.

In the current study we sought, first, to distinguish associations with health arising from types of trauma as indicated by betrayal trauma theory (Freyd, 1996, 2001), and, second, to investigate the impact of disclosing a trauma history in survey form and/or writing essays about betrayal traumas. We recruited 99 community adults reporting at least 12 months of chronic medical illness or pain, 80 of whom completed all four sessions of this six-month longitudinal intervention study. Participants were randomly assigned to write about betrayal traumas or neutral events, and they were randomly assigned to complete an extensive trauma survey or a long personality inventory, producing four groups of participants. All 99 participants were assessed at their initial visit for trauma history using the Brief Betrayal Trauma Survey (BBTS) and physical and mental symptoms. The BBTS assesses exposure to both traumas high in betrayal (such as abuse by a close other) and traumas low in betrayal but high in life-threat (such as an automobile accident). Exposure to traumas with high betrayal was significantly correlated with number of physical illness, anxiety, dissociation, and depression symptoms. Amount of exposure to other types of traumas (low betrayal traumas) did not predict symptoms over and above exposure to betrayal trauma. While neither the survey manipulation nor the writing intervention led to main effects on change in symptoms over time, there were interactions between betrayal trauma history and condition such that participants with many betrayal traumas fared better in the control conditions while participants with fewer betrayal traumas had better outcomes if they were placed in the trauma writing and/or survey conditions. We discuss ongoing and future research aimed at evaluating the role of increased structure in writing assignments as beneficial for those with severe histories of betrayal trauma.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Forgetting trauma stimuli.

Previous work reported in this journal suggested that the cognitive capacities of high dissociators are impaired under conditions of focused (selective) attention, but not under conditions of divided attention, compared with the cognitive capacities of low dissociators. Using a directed-forgetting paradigm, the current study demonstrated that under divided-attention demands, high dissociators have impaired memory for words associated with trauma (e.g., incest) but not for neutral words, as compared with low dissociators. In addition, high dissociators reported significantly more trauma history and significantly more betrayal trauma (abuse by a caregiver) than low dissociators. These results are consistent with the proposal that dissociation may aid individuals with histories of betrayal traumas to keep threatening information out of awareness.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

A genetic analysis of individual differences in dissociative behaviors in childhood and adolescence.

BACKGROUND: Dissociation--a pattern of general disruption in memory and consciousness--has been found to be an important cognitive component of children's and adults' coping with severe trauma. Dissociative experiences include amnesia, identity disturbance, age regression, difficulty with concentration, and trance states. Stable individual differences in dissociative behaviors may represent a dissociative tendency trait that varies in the population independent of the influence of trauma. METHOD: In the current study, we examined genetic and environmental sources of variance in some of these behaviors by comparing 86 pairs of adoptive siblings and 102 pairs of full siblings from the Colorado Adoption Project (parents' and teachers' ratings), and 218 pairs of identical and 173 pairs of same-sex fraternal twins from the British Register for Child Twins (parents' ratings). The study used a dissociation scale comprised of six CBCL items. RESULTS: Developmentally, there was no change in mean dissociation scores across middle childhood and adolescence, and individual differences were moderately stable. Both parents' and teachers' ratings showed moderate to substantial amounts of genetic and nonshared environmental variance and negligible shared environmental variance, and most of the parent-teacher agreement in their ratings was accounted for by overlapping genetic variance. CONCLUSIONS: The results support further research into possible genetic and environmental factors that contribute to dissociative tendencies in children and adolescents.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

What's in a name for memory errors? Implications and ethical issues arising from the use of the term "false memory" for errors in memory for details.

The term "false memories" has been used to refer to suggestibility experiments in which whole events are apparently confabulated and in media accounts of contested memories of childhood abuse. Since 1992 psychologists have increasingly used the term "false memory" when discussing memory errors for details, such as specific words within lists. Use of the term to refer to errors in details is a shift in language away from other terms used historically (e.g., "memory intrusions"). We empirically examine this shift in language and discuss implications of the new use of the term "false memories." Use of the term presents serious ethical challenges to the data-interpretation process by encouraging over-generalization and misapplication of research findings on word memory to social issues.

Adult↗