The Diagnostic Role of Autobiographical Memory, Attachment and Identity in the patients with the Post-traumatic Stress and Generalized Anxiety Disorders

The present research has been conducted to study the diagnostic role of autobiographical memory, attachment and identity in the patients with the post-traumatic stress and generalized anxiety disorders. The selected samples in this causal-comparative study included 24 patients suffering from the post-traumatic stress disorder, 20 suffering from the generalized anxiety disorder and 32 normal people in similar ages and social conditions. They were tested and interviewed during two sessions after the researcher has explained them the necessary details and have got their consent. Beck’s depression inventory, Beck’s anxiety inventory, the revised event-effect scale, the attachment scale, the identity assessment scale, the autobiographical memory interview and the autobiographical memory test were used to achieve the goal of this research. The results revealed that healthy people’s performance was better than the performance of those suffering from PTSD in all the subscales of autobiographical memory in the three different periods of childhood, adulthood and the recent past and both in the semantic and episodic sections. Furthermore, the results of the autobiographical memory test indicated a reduction in PTSD suffering patients’ specific memory in comparison to the people in the normal group. Also GAD suffering people’s performance was better than that of PTSD suffering ones only in the subscale of adulthood events. The coupled comparison of the groups showed that the average secure attachment style in the healthy group was significantly higher than that of the people in the GAD group however, the average score is lower in this group than the other two patient ones in terms of insecure anxiety. The analytical-diagnostic results also showed that 69.7 percent of people in these three groups have been accurately placed in their groups.