Unraveling intrusions
| PhD ceremony: | Ms P. (Patricia) Dashorst |
| When: | November 09, 2023 |
| Start: | 11:00 |
| Supervisors: | prof. dr. R.J.C. (Rafaele) Huntjens, prof. dr. G.T.M. Mooren, prof. dr. P.J. (Peter) de Jong, prof. dr. R.J. Kleber |
| Where: | Academy building RUG / Student Information & Administration |
| Faculty: | Behavioural and Social Sciences |
Traumatic events as happen in the context of the violence of war may cause the occurrence of intrusions – images or thoughts of such a traumatic event that arise spontaneously and involuntarily. This PhD thesis demonstrates that people can also experience intrusions about events they have not witnessed themselves. Thus, it emerged that a group of children who were born after the war to World War Two survivors and who were in treatment for mental complaints experienced intrusions about the Second World War.
As to the content of these indirect intrusions, it transpired that they often include visual images of horrendous scenes from the Second World War; moreover, they could be accompanied by feelings of fear and depression. The frequency of these indirect intrusions was found to be relatively high in people with a relatively high fantasy proneness. Moreover, the frequency and characteristics of indirect intrusions were similar to those of direct intrusions about traumatic events that were self-experienced.
Current models of intrusions attribute a crucial role to specific memory processes occurring during traumatic events. However, these models cannot account for indirect intrusions since these concern events that the person involved did not witness themselves. Yet indirect intrusions can be explained through the more general mnemonic memory model, which lays emphasis on (re)constructive processes as memories are retrieved and stored again independently of the actual event. In this thesis, the significance of this memory model for explaining the occurrence of intrusions is being discussed.