{"id":{"repo_id":"gmu","oai_identifier":"oai:MARS:1920/13788"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/gmu/oai:MARS:1920/13788","repository":{"repo_id":"gmu","name":"George Mason University","base_url":"https://mars.gmu.edu/server/oai/request"},"display":{"title":"TRAUMA-RELATED COGNITIONS: THE ROLE OF ATTRIBUTIONS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF POTENTIALLY TRAUMATIC EVENTS","abstract":"Potentially traumatic events (PTEs) are very common, with around 90% of people experiencing at least one PTE over the course of their life. Most individuals who experience a PTE naturally recover after experiencing transient short-term negative reactions, but a small percentage go on to experience significant consequences, to include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Several models have been posed to understand determinants of post-PTE response, including how PTE-related cognitions may shape responses to such an event. The current project seeks to expand our understanding of cognitive mechanisms in this process, specifically attributions, or the causal explanations that people develop for an event. Attributions are generally categorized into five overarching dimensions: internal/external (something internal to themselves vs. an external factor or situation), stable/unstable (something likely to persist over time vs. something transient), controllable/uncontrollable (something under one’s control vs. not under one’s control), personal/universal (something that applies to only the person making the attribution vs. applies to most people), and global/specific (something that applies to most areas of one’s life vs. only applicable to one area). Numerous studies have shown that more severe PTSD symptoms are related to attributions that are stable, internal, uncontrollable, and global, but inconsistencies in results and assessment methods exist across studies, and few studies to date have included the personal/universal dimension. To examine these issues, I collected data from 337 college students who had directly experienced, witnessed, or had a close family member exposed to a PTE, for which they identified at least one perceived cause for that event. Participants were recruited from February to December of 2020 and completed an online survey including several self-report questionnaires with some open-text measures, focused on participants’ PTE exposure, PTSD symptoms, and attributions regarding the worse PTE they identified. For this dissertation, I examined these data in two related but separate studies. In Study 1, I directly compared two methods of assessing PTE attributions. Both methods were based on asking participants to write, in their own words, up to three unique causes to which they attributed the event. For each cause they listed, participants were then asked to answer 5 Likert scale items, each assessing one of the 5 attributional dimensions on a scale from 1 (one end of a dimension) to 7 (the other end of the dimension). Later, the same open-text responses were coded by research assistants who were trained to identify the same 5 attributional dimensions through an attributional coding scheme in which causes were coded on one end of the dimension or the other or coded as “mixed” or “uncodable.” After coding was complete, I conducted five one-way ANOVAs (one per dimension), comparing participants’ self-report score for that dimension across responses that were coded by the research team on one end of the dimension or the other (e.g., comparing self-report internal/external scores on comments the coding team rated as internal to self-report internal/external scores on comments the coding team rated as external). All five ANOVAs were significant, but inspection of the means revealed a much narrower differences of scores than was expected. Subsequently, for any participants who had listed more than one cause, I created a single self-report score for each dimension by averaging the self-report scores for the respective dimension across each listed cause. Similarly, coders assigned a code for each dimension considering all causes together simultaneously. Once again, the one-way ANOVA for each dimension was significant, but the actual mean differences were narrow. Moreover, on some dimensions, attributions coded as mixed actually had the highest participant self-ratings, which did not align with expectations. In sum, the two methods of assessment did not appear to provide similar information. I also examined the multivariate associations of the attributional dimensions with participants’ self-reported PTSD scores, using both self-report data and coding data. Using self-report scores, I found that more personal, internal, and global attributions were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity, generally consistent with prior research. Using coding data, the only significant relationships found were that mixed internal/external attributions and mixed global/specific attributions were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity, which contradicted prior research and clinical expectations that mixed attributions are healthier. Thus, it appears that how attributions for a PTE experience are assessed can produce different results, and the pattern of results suggested that participants’ self-report may have more utility and validity than objective coding. In Study 2, I examined how trauma type (interpersonal vs. non-interpersonal) related to different types of attributions, and if those associations might help illuminate the well-established finding that interpersonal traumas are associated with greater PTSD symptom severity in survivors than are non-interpersonal traumas. Given the results of Study 1, I used participant self-report data to represent attributions. Participants’ target PTEs were categorized as interpersonal or non-interpersonal, according to guidelines from prior research, yielding a total of 141 interpersonal and 196 non-interpersonal target events. A significant one-way ANOVA confirmed that PTSD symptom severity was higher in those reporting interpersonal PTEs than in those reporting non-interpersonal PTEs. Five one-way ANOVAs comparing attributional dimension scores across interpersonal and non-interpersonal PTEs revealed that interpersonal PTEs were associated with significantly more internal attributions than external attributions and significantly more controllable attributions than uncontrollable attributions. No significant differences were obtained for the stable/unstable, global/specific, or personal/universal dimensions. Results of a subsequent path analysis revealed that interpersonal trauma was associated with more internal and controllable attributions; internal, controllable, and personal attributions were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity, and interpersonal trauma was association with PTSD symptoms severity. Although attributions accounted for a significant portion of the association between trauma type and PTSD symptom severity, the bulk of this association was still direct from trauma type to PTSD symptoms. Finally, regression analyses revealed no moderation by trauma type of the association between any of the attributional dimensions and PTSD symptom severity. Altogether, attributions seem to play a role in how survivors perceive PTEs and the subsequent impact of those events, and the method of assessment has a large influence on the empirical evaluation of this phenomenon. My results suggest that objective coding of survivors’ stated causes for a PTE may not be as informative as survivors’ own self-report of their attributions; however, it is important to note that my assessment relied on prompted attributions, rather than spontaneous attributions. Further research is needed to understand how qualitative coding of spontaneously produced attributions might compare to prompted self-report of attributions, as well as whether clinicians’ understanding of clients’ attributions possess more validity than ratings from trained research assistants.","abstract_html":"Potentially traumatic events (PTEs) are very common, with around 90% of people experiencing at least one PTE over the course of their life. Most individuals who experience a PTE naturally recover after experiencing transient short-term negative reactions, but a small percentage go on to experience significant consequences, to include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Several models have been posed to understand determinants of post-PTE response, including how PTE-related cognitions may shape responses to such an event. The current project seeks to expand our understanding of cognitive mechanisms in this process, specifically attributions, or the causal explanations that people develop for an event. Attributions are generally categorized into five overarching dimensions: internal/external (something internal to themselves vs. an external factor or situation), stable/unstable (something likely to persist over time vs. something transient), controllable/uncontrollable (something under one’s control vs. not under one’s control), personal/universal (something that applies to only the person making the attribution vs. applies to most people), and global/specific (something that applies to most areas of one’s life vs. only applicable to one area). Numerous studies have shown that more severe PTSD symptoms are related to attributions that are stable, internal, uncontrollable, and global, but inconsistencies in results and assessment methods exist across studies, and few studies to date have included the personal/universal dimension. To examine these issues, I collected data from 337 college students who had directly experienced, witnessed, or had a close family member exposed to a PTE, for which they identified at least one perceived cause for that event. Participants were recruited from February to December of 2020 and completed an online survey including several self-report questionnaires with some open-text measures, focused on participants’ PTE exposure, PTSD symptoms, and attributions regarding the worse PTE they identified. For this dissertation, I examined these data in two related but separate studies. In Study 1, I directly compared two methods of assessing PTE attributions. Both methods were based on asking participants to write, in their own words, up to three unique causes to which they attributed the event. For each cause they listed, participants were then asked to answer 5 Likert scale items, each assessing one of the 5 attributional dimensions on a scale from 1 (one end of a dimension) to 7 (the other end of the dimension). Later, the same open-text responses were coded by research assistants who were trained to identify the same 5 attributional dimensions through an attributional coding scheme in which causes were coded on one end of the dimension or the other or coded as “mixed” or “uncodable.” After coding was complete, I conducted five one-way ANOVAs (one per dimension), comparing participants’ self-report score for that dimension across responses that were coded by the research team on one end of the dimension or the other (e.g., comparing self-report internal/external scores on comments the coding team rated as internal to self-report internal/external scores on comments the coding team rated as external). All five ANOVAs were significant, but inspection of the means revealed a much narrower differences of scores than was expected. Subsequently, for any participants who had listed more than one cause, I created a single self-report score for each dimension by averaging the self-report scores for the respective dimension across each listed cause. Similarly, coders assigned a code for each dimension considering all causes together simultaneously. Once again, the one-way ANOVA for each dimension was significant, but the actual mean differences were narrow. Moreover, on some dimensions, attributions coded as mixed actually had the highest participant self-ratings, which did not align with expectations. In sum, the two methods of assessment did not appear to provide similar information. I also examined the multivariate associations of the attributional dimensions with participants’ self-reported PTSD scores, using both self-report data and coding data. Using self-report scores, I found that more personal, internal, and global attributions were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity, generally consistent with prior research. Using coding data, the only significant relationships found were that mixed internal/external attributions and mixed global/specific attributions were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity, which contradicted prior research and clinical expectations that mixed attributions are healthier. Thus, it appears that how attributions for a PTE experience are assessed can produce different results, and the pattern of results suggested that participants’ self-report may have more utility and validity than objective coding. In Study 2, I examined how trauma type (interpersonal vs. non-interpersonal) related to different types of attributions, and if those associations might help illuminate the well-established finding that interpersonal traumas are associated with greater PTSD symptom severity in survivors than are non-interpersonal traumas. Given the results of Study 1, I used participant self-report data to represent attributions. Participants’ target PTEs were categorized as interpersonal or non-interpersonal, according to guidelines from prior research, yielding a total of 141 interpersonal and 196 non-interpersonal target events. A significant one-way ANOVA confirmed that PTSD symptom severity was higher in those reporting interpersonal PTEs than in those reporting non-interpersonal PTEs. Five one-way ANOVAs comparing attributional dimension scores across interpersonal and non-interpersonal PTEs revealed that interpersonal PTEs were associated with significantly more internal attributions than external attributions and significantly more controllable attributions than uncontrollable attributions. No significant differences were obtained for the stable/unstable, global/specific, or personal/universal dimensions. Results of a subsequent path analysis revealed that interpersonal trauma was associated with more internal and controllable attributions; internal, controllable, and personal attributions were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity, and interpersonal trauma was association with PTSD symptoms severity. Although attributions accounted for a significant portion of the association between trauma type and PTSD symptom severity, the bulk of this association was still direct from trauma type to PTSD symptoms. Finally, regression analyses revealed no moderation by trauma type of the association between any of the attributional dimensions and PTSD symptom severity. Altogether, attributions seem to play a role in how survivors perceive PTEs and the subsequent impact of those events, and the method of assessment has a large influence on the empirical evaluation of this phenomenon. My results suggest that objective coding of survivors’ stated causes for a PTE may not be as informative as survivors’ own self-report of their attributions; however, it is important to note that my assessment relied on prompted attributions, rather than spontaneous attributions. Further research is needed to understand how qualitative coding of spontaneously produced attributions might compare to prompted self-report of attributions, as well as whether clinicians’ understanding of clients’ attributions possess more validity than ratings from trained research assistants.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Ribeiro, Sissi H"],"institution":null,"degree_name":null,"degree_level":null,"degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":[],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2024,"date_issued":"2024","date_published":"2024","updated_at":"2026-07-27T19:51:52Z","subjects":[],"languages":[],"rights":[],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["hdl:1920/13788"],"render_values":[{"text":"hdl:1920/13788","href":null,"code":true}]}]},"links":{"outbound_url":null,"outbound_label":null,"outbound_source":null},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date.issued","label":"Date","values":["2024"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["Dissertation"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["hdl:1920/13788"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description.other","label":"Dc Description Other","values":["Potentially traumatic events (PTEs) are very common, with around 90% of people experiencing at least one PTE over the course of their life. Most individuals who experience a PTE naturally recover after experiencing transient short-term negative reactions, but a small percentage go on to experience significant consequences, to include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Several models have been posed to understand determinants of post-PTE response, including how PTE-related cognitions may shape responses to such an event. The current project seeks to expand our understanding of cognitive mechanisms in this process, specifically attributions, or the causal explanations that people develop for an event. Attributions are generally categorized into five overarching dimensions: internal/external (something internal to themselves vs. an external factor or situation), stable/unstable (something likely to persist over time vs. something transient), controllable/uncontrollable (something under one’s control vs. not under one’s control), personal/universal (something that applies to only the person making the attribution vs. applies to most people), and global/specific (something that applies to most areas of one’s life vs. only applicable to one area). Numerous studies have shown that more severe PTSD symptoms are related to attributions that are stable, internal, uncontrollable, and global, but inconsistencies in results and assessment methods exist across studies, and few studies to date have included the personal/universal dimension. To examine these issues, I collected data from 337 college students who had directly experienced, witnessed, or had a close family member exposed to a PTE, for which they identified at least one perceived cause for that event. Participants were recruited from February to December of 2020 and completed an online survey including several self-report questionnaires with some open-text measures, focused on participants’ PTE exposure, PTSD symptoms, and attributions regarding the worse PTE they identified. For this dissertation, I examined these data in two related but separate studies. In Study 1, I directly compared two methods of assessing PTE attributions. Both methods were based on asking participants to write, in their own words, up to three unique causes to which they attributed the event. For each cause they listed, participants were then asked to answer 5 Likert scale items, each assessing one of the 5 attributional dimensions on a scale from 1 (one end of a dimension) to 7 (the other end of the dimension). Later, the same open-text responses were coded by research assistants who were trained to identify the same 5 attributional dimensions through an attributional coding scheme in which causes were coded on one end of the dimension or the other or coded as “mixed” or “uncodable.” After coding was complete, I conducted five one-way ANOVAs (one per dimension), comparing participants’ self-report score for that dimension across responses that were coded by the research team on one end of the dimension or the other (e.g., comparing self-report internal/external scores on comments the coding team rated as internal to self-report internal/external scores on comments the coding team rated as external). All five ANOVAs were significant, but inspection of the means revealed a much narrower differences of scores than was expected. Subsequently, for any participants who had listed more than one cause, I created a single self-report score for each dimension by averaging the self-report scores for the respective dimension across each listed cause. Similarly, coders assigned a code for each dimension considering all causes together simultaneously. Once again, the one-way ANOVA for each dimension was significant, but the actual mean differences were narrow. Moreover, on some dimensions, attributions coded as mixed actually had the highest participant self-ratings, which did not align with expectations. In sum, the two methods of assessment did not appear to provide similar information. I also examined the multivariate associations of the attributional dimensions with participants’ self-reported PTSD scores, using both self-report data and coding data. Using self-report scores, I found that more personal, internal, and global attributions were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity, generally consistent with prior research. Using coding data, the only significant relationships found were that mixed internal/external attributions and mixed global/specific attributions were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity, which contradicted prior research and clinical expectations that mixed attributions are healthier. Thus, it appears that how attributions for a PTE experience are assessed can produce different results, and the pattern of results suggested that participants’ self-report may have more utility and validity than objective coding. In Study 2, I examined how trauma type (interpersonal vs. non-interpersonal) related to different types of attributions, and if those associations might help illuminate the well-established finding that interpersonal traumas are associated with greater PTSD symptom severity in survivors than are non-interpersonal traumas. Given the results of Study 1, I used participant self-report data to represent attributions. Participants’ target PTEs were categorized as interpersonal or non-interpersonal, according to guidelines from prior research, yielding a total of 141 interpersonal and 196 non-interpersonal target events. A significant one-way ANOVA confirmed that PTSD symptom severity was higher in those reporting interpersonal PTEs than in those reporting non-interpersonal PTEs. Five one-way ANOVAs comparing attributional dimension scores across interpersonal and non-interpersonal PTEs revealed that interpersonal PTEs were associated with significantly more internal attributions than external attributions and significantly more controllable attributions than uncontrollable attributions. No significant differences were obtained for the stable/unstable, global/specific, or personal/universal dimensions. Results of a subsequent path analysis revealed that interpersonal trauma was associated with more internal and controllable attributions; internal, controllable, and personal attributions were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity, and interpersonal trauma was association with PTSD symptoms severity. Although attributions accounted for a significant portion of the association between trauma type and PTSD symptom severity, the bulk of this association was still direct from trauma type to PTSD symptoms. Finally, regression analyses revealed no moderation by trauma type of the association between any of the attributional dimensions and PTSD symptom severity. Altogether, attributions seem to play a role in how survivors perceive PTEs and the subsequent impact of those events, and the method of assessment has a large influence on the empirical evaluation of this phenomenon. My results suggest that objective coding of survivors’ stated causes for a PTE may not be as informative as survivors’ own self-report of their attributions; however, it is important to note that my assessment relied on prompted attributions, rather than spontaneous attributions. Further research is needed to understand how qualitative coding of spontaneously produced attributions might compare to prompted self-report of attributions, as well as whether clinicians’ understanding of clients’ attributions possess more validity than ratings from trained research assistants."]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["TRAUMA-RELATED COGNITIONS: THE ROLE OF ATTRIBUTIONS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF POTENTIALLY TRAUMATIC EVENTS"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:date.issued":["2024"],"dc:description.other":["Potentially traumatic events (PTEs) are very common, with around 90% of people experiencing at least one PTE over the course of their life. Most individuals who experience a PTE naturally recover after experiencing transient short-term negative reactions, but a small percentage go on to experience significant consequences, to include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Several models have been posed to understand determinants of post-PTE response, including how PTE-related cognitions may shape responses to such an event. The current project seeks to expand our understanding of cognitive mechanisms in this process, specifically attributions, or the causal explanations that people develop for an event. Attributions are generally categorized into five overarching dimensions: internal/external (something internal to themselves vs. an external factor or situation), stable/unstable (something likely to persist over time vs. something transient), controllable/uncontrollable (something under one’s control vs. not under one’s control), personal/universal (something that applies to only the person making the attribution vs. applies to most people), and global/specific (something that applies to most areas of one’s life vs. only applicable to one area). Numerous studies have shown that more severe PTSD symptoms are related to attributions that are stable, internal, uncontrollable, and global, but inconsistencies in results and assessment methods exist across studies, and few studies to date have included the personal/universal dimension. To examine these issues, I collected data from 337 college students who had directly experienced, witnessed, or had a close family member exposed to a PTE, for which they identified at least one perceived cause for that event. Participants were recruited from February to December of 2020 and completed an online survey including several self-report questionnaires with some open-text measures, focused on participants’ PTE exposure, PTSD symptoms, and attributions regarding the worse PTE they identified. For this dissertation, I examined these data in two related but separate studies. In Study 1, I directly compared two methods of assessing PTE attributions. Both methods were based on asking participants to write, in their own words, up to three unique causes to which they attributed the event. For each cause they listed, participants were then asked to answer 5 Likert scale items, each assessing one of the 5 attributional dimensions on a scale from 1 (one end of a dimension) to 7 (the other end of the dimension). Later, the same open-text responses were coded by research assistants who were trained to identify the same 5 attributional dimensions through an attributional coding scheme in which causes were coded on one end of the dimension or the other or coded as “mixed” or “uncodable.” After coding was complete, I conducted five one-way ANOVAs (one per dimension), comparing participants’ self-report score for that dimension across responses that were coded by the research team on one end of the dimension or the other (e.g., comparing self-report internal/external scores on comments the coding team rated as internal to self-report internal/external scores on comments the coding team rated as external). All five ANOVAs were significant, but inspection of the means revealed a much narrower differences of scores than was expected. Subsequently, for any participants who had listed more than one cause, I created a single self-report score for each dimension by averaging the self-report scores for the respective dimension across each listed cause. Similarly, coders assigned a code for each dimension considering all causes together simultaneously. Once again, the one-way ANOVA for each dimension was significant, but the actual mean differences were narrow. Moreover, on some dimensions, attributions coded as mixed actually had the highest participant self-ratings, which did not align with expectations. In sum, the two methods of assessment did not appear to provide similar information. I also examined the multivariate associations of the attributional dimensions with participants’ self-reported PTSD scores, using both self-report data and coding data. Using self-report scores, I found that more personal, internal, and global attributions were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity, generally consistent with prior research. Using coding data, the only significant relationships found were that mixed internal/external attributions and mixed global/specific attributions were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity, which contradicted prior research and clinical expectations that mixed attributions are healthier. Thus, it appears that how attributions for a PTE experience are assessed can produce different results, and the pattern of results suggested that participants’ self-report may have more utility and validity than objective coding. In Study 2, I examined how trauma type (interpersonal vs. non-interpersonal) related to different types of attributions, and if those associations might help illuminate the well-established finding that interpersonal traumas are associated with greater PTSD symptom severity in survivors than are non-interpersonal traumas. Given the results of Study 1, I used participant self-report data to represent attributions. Participants’ target PTEs were categorized as interpersonal or non-interpersonal, according to guidelines from prior research, yielding a total of 141 interpersonal and 196 non-interpersonal target events. A significant one-way ANOVA confirmed that PTSD symptom severity was higher in those reporting interpersonal PTEs than in those reporting non-interpersonal PTEs. Five one-way ANOVAs comparing attributional dimension scores across interpersonal and non-interpersonal PTEs revealed that interpersonal PTEs were associated with significantly more internal attributions than external attributions and significantly more controllable attributions than uncontrollable attributions. No significant differences were obtained for the stable/unstable, global/specific, or personal/universal dimensions. Results of a subsequent path analysis revealed that interpersonal trauma was associated with more internal and controllable attributions; internal, controllable, and personal attributions were associated with greater PTSD symptom severity, and interpersonal trauma was association with PTSD symptoms severity. Although attributions accounted for a significant portion of the association between trauma type and PTSD symptom severity, the bulk of this association was still direct from trauma type to PTSD symptoms. Finally, regression analyses revealed no moderation by trauma type of the association between any of the attributional dimensions and PTSD symptom severity. Altogether, attributions seem to play a role in how survivors perceive PTEs and the subsequent impact of those events, and the method of assessment has a large influence on the empirical evaluation of this phenomenon. My results suggest that objective coding of survivors’ stated causes for a PTE may not be as informative as survivors’ own self-report of their attributions; however, it is important to note that my assessment relied on prompted attributions, rather than spontaneous attributions. Further research is needed to understand how qualitative coding of spontaneously produced attributions might compare to prompted self-report of attributions, as well as whether clinicians’ understanding of clients’ attributions possess more validity than ratings from trained research assistants."],"dc:identifier":["hdl:1920/13788"],"dc:title":["TRAUMA-RELATED COGNITIONS: THE ROLE OF ATTRIBUTIONS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF POTENTIALLY TRAUMATIC EVENTS"],"dc:type":["Dissertation"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-27T19:51:52Z"}