Trauma Psychology News

Presidential Voice

By: Diane Castillo, PhD

In this note, I have two topics of focus. First, I wish to congratulate you all for a wonderful convention at APA in San Francisco. As Program Chair, Dr. Bryann DeBeer did a wonderful job of organizing our outstanding Division programming and making it all public as the Chair of the Social Media Committee. I wish to acknowledge her efforts and the efforts of the many others which contributed to a great convention.... Full Article

Editor's Note

By: Jonathan Cleveland, PhD

Welcome to the fall issue of Trauma Psychology News (TPN). In this issue, we bring you two new sections. The Military Psychology section contains a discussion of a specialized intervention called Impact of Killing (IOK), by Drs. Shira Maguen and Kristine Burkman. In the first appearance of the Philosophical/Psychoanalyticsection, you will find a thought-provoking article/book-review by Dr. Robert Stolorow... Full Article

2018 Awards Presented

Announcing Winners & Brief Biographies of Division 56 Awards

Amy E. Ellis, Ph.D. & Vanessa Simiola, Psy.D.

On Friday, August 10^th, the Trauma Psychology Division held its Social Hour and Awards Ceremony to honor the various members whose work has been pivotal in the field of trauma. Award winners were either nominated by colleagues or self-nominated, and reviewed based on established criteria for appropriateness for the particular award, quality of work, significance of contributions, and commitment to the field of trauma psychology.... Full Article

2018 Travel Awards

APA 2018 Travel Awardees

Christine Valdez, Ph.D.

Division 56 is in its second year supporting two scholarships (1 student member and 1 ECP member) of $500 each to assist with travel expenses associated with attending the annual APA Convention. These scholarships are intended to increase Division 56 student and ECP member participation at the APA Convention. We had a number of outstanding applicants. This year’s student and ECP award recipients were Sharon Lee and Dr. Wyatt Evans, respectively... Full Article

Call for New Fellow Applications

We invite and encourage individuals who have “shown evidence of unusual and outstanding contributions or performance in the field of (trauma) psychology” with national or international impact (APA’s hallmark criteria) to apply for Fellowship status within Division 56. You must have at least five years of post-doctoral experience, be an APA member for one year, and be a current member of Division 56. Details

Archived Issues

Have you missed any of our excellent content? Check out the archived issues page to read about the work our members are doing.

Military Psychology

Impact of Killing (IOK): Expanding our Framework to Help Veterans Heal from War

Kristine Burkman, PhD & Shira Maguen, PhD

Currently, there are only two evidence-based psychotherapies (EBPs) for PTSD endorsed by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) and Prolonged Exposure (PE). Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) for PTSD have traditionally focused on a reduction in PTSD symptoms, which are often anchored to traumatic events involving direct life threat or witnessing of death or injury. However, there is a range of post-combat sequelae that veterans confront... Full Article

Member News

What to know more about what your colleagues are doing? Check out the member news section for a summary of activities, books, and presentations Division 56 members are doing.

Who's Who

Please meet Wyatt Evans, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at UT Health San Antonio and the Associate Editor of Trauma Psychology News!

Philosophical/Psychodynamic

Death, afterlife, and doomsday scenario: Why do we evade the extreme dangers of climate change?

(A review of Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife)

Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D.

In a blog post of a year ago examining the motivations underlying the pervasive evasion of the catastrophic consequences of climate change, I included this personal vignette: “More than three decades ago I took my young son to a planetarium show at the New York Museum of Natural History. During that show it was predicted that a billion years from now the sun will become a “red giant” that will engulf and destroy our entire solar system. This prospect filled me with intense horror. Why would a catastrophe predicted to occur in a billion years evoke horror in me?”... Full Article

Understanding Posttraumatic Growth in Haiti

Ainelle Mercado, Marie Valsaint, Skultip (Jill) Sirikantraporn, Grant J. Rich, & Wismick Jean-Charles

Despite being the first nation in the world created as a result of a successful slave revolt and also the first independent nation in Latin America and the Caribbean in 1804, Haiti in recent years has faced numerous problems, including poverty, corruption, unemployment, and most recently, the devastation brought upon by the 2010 earthquake. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake, centered near the capital Port-au-Prince, was one of the most traumatic events that Haiti has ever faced. An estimated 200,000 people died, and hundreds of thousands more were displaced. Psychological effects of the earthquake included posttraumatic stress symptoms and depressive symptoms... Full Article

Multicultural & Diversity

An Overview of Transgender Sexual Victimization

Shawn Fraine, MA

While the term “gender” is often equated with the construct of biological sex, it actually refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributions that are the traditional norm for one’s assigned biological sex. Most current western societies only reference two genders (male and female); however, many societies since antiquity have had more (e.g., hijras, two-spirit). The term “transgender” is used as an umbrella term for those whose assigned biological sex is different from their gender identity... Full Article

Division 56 Listservs

Anyone who belongs to Division 56 is added to div56announce@lists.apa.org listserv, for news and announcements. Join any of the following lists by sending an email to listserv@lists.apa.org and typing the following in the body of the note:subscribe name (where name is the part before the @, for example, subscribe div56stu):

div56@lists.apa.org - Discussion among members
div56childtrauma@lists.apa.org - Child trauma topics
div56dissociation@lists.apa.org - Post-traumatic dissociative mechanisms development
div56ecpn@lists.apa.org - Early career psychologists networking
div56stu@lists.apa.org - Student forum

Division 1 Awards Call

Division 1, The Society for General Psychology, seeks nominations for its 2019 awards.

For more information about each award, including where to send nominations, visit http://www.apadivisions.org/ division-1/awards/index.aspx. Nominations and supporting materials are due February 15, 2019. Self-nominations are welcome.

International Committee

Zeynep Sagir: Recipient of the Division 56 Travel Assistance Stipend for the 2018 APA Convention

By: Elizabeth Carll, PhD & Vincenzo Teran, PsyD

To encourage international participation, the APA Trauma Psychology Division provides an annual travel stipend to attend the APA Convention for international students who are citizens of developing countries and enrolled in a graduate psychology program in their home country, or enrolled in a graduate psychology program in the U.S., and who will be presenting a trauma related poster, paper, or participating in a symposium or panel at the APA Convention... Full Article

Student Spotlight

Say What? What Linguistic Analysis of Trauma Narratives Can Contribute to the Assessment and Prediction of Trauma Symptoms

By: Daisa Marshall, Stephanie Gusler, and Lee R. Eshelman

Despite decades of research, there remains no gold standard of measurement and assessment of trauma experiences and related symptomatology. The lack of standardization in measurement comes, in part, from no clear definition of what constitutes traumatic stress (Kira et al., 2008). Additionally, there is little consensus as to which contextual factors are most important to examine, and there is great variability in the range of symptomatology that may come from the experience of trauma... Full Article

Military PTSD and Post-service Violence: A Review of the Evidence

By: Joshua Camins

One of the most commonly discussed sequalae of stressful deployment experiences is posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Estimates of military service-connected PTSD range from 8.1% to 23% with the rates varying by conflict at time of service (Fulton et al., 2015; Gradus, 2017). Over the last two decades, there have been many instances in which post-deployment veterans have demonstrated violence. Although not all of these individuals have a diagnosis of PTSD, these instances often evoke sensationalized connections between PTSD and violence... Full Article

New Fellow

Eileen Zurbriggen

I am a feminist social psychologist and have been a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz for 18 years. My research focuses on the causes and consequences of behaviors that connect power and sexu- ality, from the most traumatic (e.g., sexualized torture, rape, childhood sexual abuse) to those with less obvioustraumatic impact (e.g., the objectification of women andgirls, the use of children as nude models in art photogra- phy). I aim to theorize how different kinds of traumas at different levels are related to each other. For example, in my article theorizing links between rape and war (Zurbriggen, 2010; Psychology of Women Quarterly), I argued that rape in all settings (not just wartime rape) is intimately linked with war-making because the same type of aggression-focused masculine socialization under- lies both phenomena. In some ways this is a discourag- ing insight (because it makes the problem of eliminating rape seem all the more intractable) but in other ways it is hopeful (because every action that works against rape also works against war and vice versa). I developed two undergraduate courses on trauma (Psychology of Traumaand Psychology of Sexual Aggression) which have been taken by over 1000 students and I published an article describing practices that can help minimize the chances of secondary trauma in the undergraduate classroom (Zurbriggen, 2011, Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy). I’m on the editorial board of the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, am a char- ter member of Division 56 and am deeply honored to be selected as a fellow. My advice to new trauma psycholo- gists is “Don’t go it alone.” We all need support to do thedifficult but important work we have chosen. Workingtogether, we can do much more to heal the world from violence and trauma than we can on our own.