Dr. Robert Melara is a Psychology professor at the City College of New York. He received his bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the SUNY Stony Brook institution and his PH. D in Psychology from the New School for Social Research institution. Dr. Melara has 30 years of experience as an investigator that examines the processes of different forms of distraction in humans. Dr. Melara studies different disorders that individuals face in their live, last year he published a research called “Regulation of threat in post- traumatic stress disorder: Associations between inhibitory control and dissociative symptoms”.
Post- Traumatic stress disorder is a debilitating psychiatric condition that affects the population in their lifetime. This traumatic disorder is characterized by repeated thoughts and memories of traumatic events. An example of a traumatic event that can causes PTSD. According to Dr. Melara, “In the current study, we separated threatening and non-threatening images into separate blocks of trials. Thus, participants could readily anticipate periods of threat exposure once they had begun, perhaps allowing our PTSD participants to prepare an avoidance strategy.” An example is one during the time of the Holocaust, when Jews were murdered by the Nazi. People who suffer from Post- Traumatic stress disorder experience symptoms of dissociation, including disconcerting sense of depersonalization and derealization. When these people experience depersonalization, they feel like they do not belong to one’s body. When they experience derealization they feel that their surrounding is not real. In his research he compared patients who were diagnosed with PTSD (Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder) with people who had trauma in their lives, but they did not end up with PTSD. Also, comparing these two types of people with a group that did not have PTSD. One of the goals of this study is to measure inhibitory control of distracting stimuli. In the study they used the temporal flanker paradigm among individuals that exposed to traumatic event that developed PTSD or those who did not develop the disorder, but they experienced a traumatic event and healthy people.
In order to make the study they found 45 participants from printers’ flyers and online posting. Each participant completed twenty-four blocks of experimental trials. In these experimental trials the psychologists of the study showed participants threatening
images to test their reaction and how much they could concentrate. It was more difficult for participants who had PTSD to pay attention to the task. Every time participants saw threatening images one part of the brain called the posterior cingulate becomes active. The posterior cingulate is located posterior to the anterior cingulate cortex. This is part of the limbic lobe. This part of the brain is involved with learning, motivation and with those that are sensitive to reinforcement. In the United States, we have an estimated of 70 percent of adults in the population that have faced trauma at least once in their lives and 20 percent of these people developed PTSD. More than 13 million people have PTSD at any given time. Doing research like this sort of scientists may create a technique that can decrease people from getting post- traumatic stress disorder.
One question that I asked Dr. Melara is what motivated him to do this type of research and he answered, “This kind of research is nice because it is a combination of clinical psychology and neuroscience”. Additionally, for the psychologists to complete this research they took a long time while, Dr. Melara he took one month and half to write this article. He said that doing a research like this type takes a lot of time because they have to look for clinical psychologists and then find people to do the experiments.
In addition to Dr. Melara publication, he introduces a relatable article, “Inhibitory Control under Threat: The Role of Spontaneous Eye Blinks in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” This article shows how the eye blink rate distinguish for people with PTSD and people that had a traumatic event but did not end up with PTSD. In order to do the study, they put two sets of distracting images such as a set of faces and a set of International Affective Picture System scenes.
