Traumatic events such as motor vehicle accidents, interpersonal violence, sexual abuse, and terrorist attacks may cause people to develop post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD). It also may affect their emotional behavior. PTSD can be related to emotional behavior because it is a disorder that is caused by a traumatic event. When a person faces a traumatic event, they develop a fear that they no longer can control. Emotional processing of fear is very important in this situation because a traumatized person may or may not have the ability to process the traumatic event and therefore will continue to suffer. After extensive research scientist have developed several treatments for PTSD. I will examine Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Metacognitive Therapy. These two treatments work very similarly because both therapies focus on challenging and changing patient’s unhelpful thoughts. These treatments have been demonstrated to be effective for PTSD, but there is a problem. Although scientists’ experiments give promising results, their sample sizes cannot prove if the treatments would work on every individual.
Studies show that Metacognitive therapy is one of the most effective treatments for PTSD. In the article “Metacognitive Therapy for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in Youth: A Feasibility Study”, Simons and Kursawe wanted to test if Metacognitive Therapy works on children. In their study Twenty- one children and adolescents (aged 8- 19 years) were treated with Metacognitive Therapy. (Simons at el., 2019). The study was successful for 85% to 95% of people. “Even the youngest patient, an eight-year-old girl with chronic PTSD after a house fire, completed therapy successfully after only five sessions” (Simons et al, 2019). However, like many other treatments, metacognitive therapy did not work in every individual suffering from PTSD symptom. “Only six patients were available at follow up, but their improvements were found to be stable” (Simons et al., 2019).Although their experiment was very effective with twenty- one patients, we cannot be sure if this treatment can work in every single individual because they choose a small sample size. The small sample size cannot represent the diverse circumstances of why people suffer from PTSD. Additionally, there were only six patients at follow up we are not sure if the other patients are doing well.
Cognitive control is the process of overcoming irrational thoughts and feelings. This is essentially the same as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Metacognitive Therapy. An article called “Improving Cognitive Control in Adolescents with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” shows one method to improve cognitive control which is working memory task. “The primary aim of the present study was to investigate the possibility of improving cognitive control in adolescents suffering from PTSD using an a WMT task” (Schweizer et al., 2017). In this task, people with PTSD are able to remember and use relevant information while in the middle of an activity. For this task, they used twenty sessions of training in order to improve cognitive control. This type of task can be found online for free and is available for every person. In order to measure cognitive control, they chose thirty adolescents to detect if the working memory task is useful to improve cognitive control. The working memory task is very useful for increasing cognitive control treatment because the task would help PTSD patients to acquire knowledge and improve their mind processes.
These treatments for PTSD are very important because for their measurements, they used small size groups. For the first treatment which is Metacognitive therapy they used twenty-one patients. For the second treatment which is cognitive behavioral therapy they used twenty-four patients, and for the last treatment which is increasing cognitive behavioral they used twenty-one members. Using small sample sizes makes the experiments non- generalizable. In order to be generalizable, they could use people from different countries, languages, age groups, and type of traumatic events. Having larger sample sizes might be difficult because it requires more resources. Therapies are energetically expensive because they are one on one and very personal. It is harder to give 100 people therapy than 100 people a new pill. Despite small sample sizes these treatments show effective results across studies. Even though small sample size is a weakness, it’s a strength that a large number of experiments have good results. Although scientists only use small sample sizes in their experiments for the treatment for PTSD, we can be sure that if we take all the experiments that have been done and combine them, we can say that the treatments for PTSD are effectively in adults as well as in children. In these measurements, it shows that the treatment is very successful in treating PTSD. Based off of the results from different therapeutic approaches, improving cognitive behavior shows extremely promising results in the treatment of PTSD. These different treatments may help reduce PTSD symptoms in patients, while at the same time help them to learn how to combat their own fear. For future experiments they should have a large sample sizes and make it generalizable. Also, for most of the studies they should specify the events that people with PTSD went through and be more specific about what race they are studying or if they are studying a mix. One way to get more patients is using clinical centers that are willing to participate in the experiments. Using a large sample size and more generalizable would make it more promising and convincing that the treatments would work on every individual no matter the traumatic event and the race group.
Work Cited
J.A. Cohen, A.P. Mannarino, V.R. Staron. A pilot study of modified cognitive-behavioral therapy for childhood traumatic grief (CBT-CTG)
Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 45 (12) (2006), pp. 1465-1473
Foa, E. B., & Kozak, M. J. (1986). Emotional processing of fear: Exposure to corrective information. Psychological Bulletin, 99(1), 20-35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.99.1.20
PATRICK SMITH, WILLIAM YULE, SEAN PERRIN, TROY TRANAH, TIM DALGLEISH, DAVID M. CLARK, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for PTSD in Children and Adolescents: A Preliminary Randomized Controlled Trial, Journal of the American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry, Volume 46, Issue 8, 2007, Pages 1051-1061, ISSN 0890-8567 https://doi.org/10.1097/CHI.0b013e318067e288
Simons, M and Kursawe A-L (2019) Metacognitive Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Youth: A Feasibility Study. Front. Psychol. 10:264. Doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00264 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00264
Susanne Schweitzer, Zobair Samimi, Jafar Hasani, Alireza Moradi, Fatemeh Mirdoraghi, Mohammad Khaleghi, Improving cognitive control in adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
Behaviors Research and Therapy, Volume 93, 2017, Pages 88-94, ISSN 0005-7967, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2017.03.017
