Trauma Recall and Age Differences

[NightOwl]

Does anybody know where I can find any studies that have been done which show any correlation between clarity of recall of a trauma and a victims age? For example, a child will view time on a different scale to an adult - an older person often can easily remember many years of their lifetime with clarity, as if it was yesterday, where for a child, a year seems like an eternity. Bearing in mind that trauma can block out extremely bad memories.

NightOwl

 

[Cat Dancer]

Unless the trauma was documented by, maybe, a medical professional, I'm not sure how such a study could be done? I'm interested as well.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

That's a question without a simple answer, primarily because there are many factors affecting how any given individual responds to and processes trauma.

Age is a factor in determining HOW a person reacts to trauma but the evidence as to whether this is related to severity or duration of PTSD symptoms or recall of the event(s) seems to be, I think, somewhat uncertain, and it would appear that other factors are more significant (e.g., chronicity/duration of the trauma, attachment issues, type or source of trauma, etc.).

• Post Traumatic Stress Disorder DSM IV Criteria
  
• Very Young Trauma Survivors: The Role of Attachment - National Center for PTSD
  
• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) | American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
  
• Wiley InterScience :: Session Cookies
  
• Symptom Severity, Alcohol Craving, and Age of Trauma Onset in Childhood and Adolescent Trauma Survivors with Comorbid Alcohol Dependence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder; American Journal on Addictions - 15(6)ages 422-425 - Informa Healthcare
  
• PTSD in Children and Adolescents - (National Center for PTSD)
  
• Children With Higher Intelligence Appear To Have Reduced Risk Of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Also, of course, for very young children the question is complicated by the fact that the child does not develop the beginnings of the adult memory system until about age 3, so that events prior to age 3 are less well remembered and tend to be in a more primitive "emotional" form than later memories.

Given that adult memory is for the most part reconstructive by nature and subject to interpretation and symolism, rather than "episodic" like watching a video, emergence of or retrieval of repressed memories - and specific characteristics of the circumstances by which that is achieved - is another complicating factor:

• Recovered Memories of Sexual Abuse: Scientific Research & Scholarly Resources
  
• Trauma and Memory Revisited
  
• Ability to repress childhood trauma and later recall - Abuse Support - MedHelp
  
• Trauma Information Pages, Articles: van der Kolk (1994)
  
• What Your Child Remembers -- New discoveries about early memory and how it affects us

That said, you might find these helpful:

• http://www.istss.org/publications/ChildhoodTraumaRemembered.pdf
  
• About Memory Loss Due to Trauma | eHow.com
  
• Trauma Treatment To Target Memory
  
• Sexual Abuse of Infants: A five-part question focusing on sexual abuse during infancy :::: Welcome to Child Trauma Academy :::::::::::
  
• The Children?€™s Psychological Health Center - Trauma

 

[NightOwl]

Thank you Cat Dancer and David for your replies and for all of the links for information. I'm a Survivor of a trauma as an adult but I have quite a few friends who are survivors of childhood trauma, hence the question and interest in this subject.

It has given me plenty of reading material to mull over.

NightOwl