How The Different Level Construal Repetitive Thinking Impact The Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms

According to researches for now,trauma-related rumination has been shown to predict the maintenance of posttraumatic stress disorder(PTSD).However,not all forms of repetitive thinking about a negative event appear to dysfunctional.It is obvious that there exist both constructive and unconstructive repetitive thinking.Then what determines whether repetitive thinking is adaptive or not?There is evidence that repetitive thinking characterized by high-level has more unconstructive consequences relative to RT characterized by low-level,at least when repetitive thinking is focused on negatively valenced content.The present study tested whether high-level construal repetitive thinking is unconstructive and low-level construal repetitive thinking is constructive,and why the level of construal can influence the posttraumatic stress symptoms.Study one,97 healthy university students first watched a distressing video and were then randomly assigned to abstract thinking,concrete thinking or distraction.Intrusive memories of the films were recorded for 1 week and the Impact of Events Scale-Revised was completed at 1-week follow-up.As predicted,participants in the concrete condition reported significantly fewer intrusive memories in response to the films and had lower IES-R scores compared with those in the abstract condition and distraction condition.Study two,53 healthy university students who had experienced a recent negative life event first completed a short symptom provocation task and were then randomly assigned to abstract thinking,concrete thinking.Intrusive memories were recorded in the first 48 h after the repetive thinking task.In line with the expectations,participants in the abstract condition showed strength of negative appraisals during the experimental session,and negative appraisals is an important mechanism by which the level of construal influence posttraumatic stress symptoms.Finally,the limitations of the present research were discussed;the future directions,theoretical implications and practical value of this paper were provided.