Jason Shulman

The term “trauma” was originally reserved for describing only the most intense and horrific experiences, but its meaning has expanded in both public and academic circles, leading to concerns about the subjective boundary between traumatic and adverse/distressing events. However, little research has examined how an individual’s trauma beliefs—defined as the breadth and depth of an individual's perception of what events are traumatic and how distressing they are—affect their distress after exposure to a potentially traumatic event. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether participants' pre-existing trauma beliefs, measured using the trauma subscale of the harm-related concept scale, predicted distress after being exposed to a distressing film clip, which serves as an analogue for a traumatic experience. If trauma beliefs prove to be a valuable predictor of responses to exposure they could help further our understanding of the way individuals interact with and recover from trauma. In this study individuals endorsing broader trauma beliefs were found to experience more intense negative emotions. Additionally those who perceived the film exposure as a traumatic experience experienced more event-related distress. These results highlight the potential value in using trauma beliefs in outcome prediction, while more research needs to be done in a more diverse sample to understand how people differ in the way they define trauma.