| Some unpredictable traumatic events have a non-negligible erosive effect on people’s psychological as well as spiritual levels,and PTSD has become a mental disorder of high concern to international health organizations.However,the protective factors that contribute to the relief of PTSD symptoms have received much less attention than the risk factors for PTSD.Since Viktor Frankl’s historical writings used his own personal experiences as well as asking how some Nazi concentration camp inmates maintained their will to live in the face of ubiquitous destruction,meaning of life has been interpreted as a powerful resilience factor.In recent years,with the flourishing of positive psychology,the intrinsic link between life meaning and PTSD has also become the focus of much current research,yet the conclusions reached are highly controversial.The purpose of this study is to comprehensively integrate the existing studies,to clarify the relationship between meaningful life experiences and PTSD and the strength of their effects based on the theory of anxiety buffer destruction,and to further investigate the mechanisms underlying meaningful life experiences and PTSD.In this paper,we used Meta-analysis to investigate the relationship between meaningful life experience and PTSD(Study 1)and Meta-analytic Structural Equation Modeling(MASEM)to investigate the mechanism of psychological resilience between the two(Study 2).Both studies were published with the keywords meaning of life,posttraumatic stress disorder,and psychological resilience,published from January 1980 to December 2022,and searched for literature in online databases in English and Chinese.Study 1 searched the literature on the relationship between traumaexperienced people’s experience of meaning in life and their PTSD,and a total of250 documents were de-duplicated,and 63 documents were included in the metaanalysis after screening with reference to the criteria.This sub-study used the meta,metafor,dplyr and nnet program packages in R language for data analysis,and the results showed that(1)meaningful life experience had a moderately significant negative association with PTSD with an effect size of-0.33 and 95%confidence interval of [-0.37,-0.30];(2)gender,trauma type,culture and PTSD disorder measurement instruments in the relationship between meaningful life experience and PTSD were not significant,and the moderating effects of age and meaningful life experience measurement instruments in the relationship between meaningful life experience and PTSD were significant,i.e.,the relationship between meaningful life experience and PTSD did not change with changes in gender,trauma type,culture,and PTSD measurement instruments,but changed with age and meaningful life experience measurement instruments.Study 2 supplemented Study 1 with a search of the literature on“psychological resilience”.There were 3758 articles after de-duplicating,and 14 articles were included in the meta-analysis after screening with reference to the criteria.The results showed that psychological resilience had a significant partial mediating effect on the effect of meaningful life experiences on PTSD,with an effect value of-0.11 and 95% confidence interval [-0.16,-0.07].This study further clarifies the relationship between meaningful life experiences and PTSD based on a meta-analytic perspective,demonstrating the positive effect of meaningful life experiences on PTSD over the past 43 years,and is a follow-up and integration of the latest empirical research in the field;moreover,this study further consolidates the comprehensive information that psychological resilience mediates the relationship between meaningful life experiences and PTSD.It not only helps researchers understand the latest progress and underlying mechanisms of PTSD in trauma-experienced populations and explore potential future developmental pathways,but also provides a psychometric perspective for professionals in counseling and psychotherapy to guide trauma-experienced individuals to experience life meaning and promote their psychological resilience,and thus provide a psychometric perspective for the healing of PTSD patients and crisis intervention for traumatized individuals. |
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