Differential Extinction of Disgust and Anxiety Among Victims of Sexual Traumatization

Emerging evidence suggests that in addition to fear, traumatic event-related disgust reactions may be integral to understanding the sequelae of sexual traumatization. Importantly, evidence broadly suggests compared to fear, disgust may be resistant to extinction. As such, conditioned disgust reactions may not evidence the same pattern of extinction observed with fear-based reactions. This may have important implications for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As such, the current study sought to fill an important gap in the existing literature by examining specific processes and mechanisms that are likely to affect outcomes of exposure-based interventions following sexual traumatization. Specifically, 72 women with a history of sexual victimization completed a laboratory-based assessment of disgust- and fear-based emotional reactivity in response to repeated exposures to disgust- and fear-focused idiographic scripts of their traumatic event. Results demonstrated that initial disgust responding was significantly greater than anxiety responding. Anxiety declined significantly across the course of exposure while disgust did not. However, comparison of slopes in disgust and anxiety did not result in significant differences. Theoretical and practical implications as well as directions for future research are discussed

An Empirical Investigation of Emotional Reactivity and Elevated Mental contamination: a Comparison of Sexual and Physical Assault

Although evidence suggests that disgust and disgust-related phenomena such as mental contamination should be associated with the experience of sexual assault, there has been relatively little direct examination of this relation. Consequently, the primary aim of the current study was to conduct a multimodal assessment of disgust and mental contamination-based reactivity to an individualized script-driven imagery procedure. Participants included 27 sexually assaulted, 25 physically assaulted, and 30 non-traumatized control female adults. Subjective reactivity (i.e., ratings of disgust, anxiety, feelings of dirtiness, and urges to wash), physiological reactivity (i.e., electromyogram activity of the right levator labii superioris and medial frontalis regions) and behavioral responding (i.e., hand washing) were assessed following the presentation of both a neutral and traumatic event script (stressful script for the control group). It was hypothesized that sexually assaulted women would demonstrate elevations in subjective, physiological, and behavioral indices of disgust and mental contamination-based reactivity to the traumatic event script relative to the physical assault and control groups. It was further hypothesized that both assault groups would respond with comparably elevated levels of subjective anxious reactivity (i.e., ratings of anxiety) as compared to the non-traumatized control group. Theoretical and practical implications as well as directions for future research are discussed