The child PTSD Symptom Scale: a preliminary examination of its psychometric properties.

Reports on the development and preliminary validation of the Child PTSD Symptom Scale (CPSS) for children and adolescents. The CPSS is a new instrument that was developed to assess the severity of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms in children exposed to trauma. The CPSS was administered to 75 school-age children approximately 2 years after the 1994 Northridge, California, earthquake. The psychometric properties of the CPSS show high internal consistency and test-retest reliability for both the total score and the three subscales. Convergent validity with the Child Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Reaction Index (CPTSD-RI) was established. As expected, the correlations of the CPSS with depression and anxiety measures were lower than those with the CPTSD-RI, providing some support for discriminant validity of the CPSS. These results suggest that the CPSS is a useful tool for the assessment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) severity and for the screening of PTSD diagnosis among traumatized children.

Exploring the roles of emotional numbing, depression, and dissociation in PTSD.

Some researchers consider emotional numbing a cardinal feature of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Others view numbing symptoms as representing an overlap between PTSD, depression, and dissociation. In this study, we examined the ability of early emotional numbing, depression, and dissociation symptoms to predict PTSD. One-hundred sixty-one women who were recent victims of sexual or nonsexual assault were assessed prospectively for 12 weeks. Emotional numbing, depression, and dissociation were each associated with initial PTSD severity. Notably, regression analyses revealed that after depression and dissociation were accounted for, early numbing contributed to the prediction of later PTSD.

Anger, dissociation, and posttraumatic stress disorder among female assault victims.

The goal of the present study was to explore the relationship between anger and dissociation and their relationship to symptoms of post-trauma pathology. One hundred four female assault victims were assessed prospectively 2, 4, and 12 weeks post-assault. Measures of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) severity, social functioning, anger, and dissociation were obtained at all assessments. Results revealed that differentiation between symptoms that predict later PTSD and impaired social functioning first becomes evident at 4 weeks post-assault. At 4 weeks post-assault, anger expression was predictive of later PTSD severity, whereas dissociation was predictive of poorer later functioning.