The Working Memory Deficits in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Relevant Interventions

Abstract

Working memory is one of the essential abilities. When people have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), their working memory is also impaired, mainly reflected in aspects of capacity and updating. When people directly face the disaster, it may bring serious psychological consequences and indirectly affect the injured people, leading them to suffer from PTSD. Some factors, such as personal and property safety, social support and background, and disaster mortality, can predict the incidence rate of PTSD. This paper aims to improve people's understanding of PTSD and working memory impairment and provides some insights and guidance for future research. By discussing recent studies, it can be found that PTSD patients have poor attention and task execution ability, impaired visual and auditory working memory, and insufficient capacity and updating ability of work memory. Some interventions also trained some components of working memory, which effectively alleviated the related symptoms of patients. There are relatively few relevant studies in this field, and there is a lack of sufficient evidence to prove the impact of working memory on PTSD directly. Future studies should examine this relationship with more systematic experimental designs. This review can provide some suggestions to the design of early intervention programs for at-risk populations.