Nietzsche had a famous saying: “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” The phenomenon described by this line does indeed exist in real life. After experiencing a major traumatic event, some people develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and continue to be tormented by traumatic memories. But for others, the opposite happens: not only do they recover quickly after the trauma, their mental health becomes even better than it was before the blow. This is what is known as post-traumatic growth. They weren’t killed; they became stronger.
So why does post-traumatic growth happen? A recently published paper revealed one possible mechanism: people make an effort to suppress the urge to recall their traumatic memories. This effort to restrain an impulse amounts to a kind of mental training, training them to control their own minds more freely. The website Research Digest reported on the study (see References).
Put simply, the study went like this:
Based on the participants’ self-reports, they were divided into a high-trauma group and a low-trauma group. The participants in the high-trauma group had experienced a relatively large number of traumatic events before the age of 18, including witnessing or experiencing accidents and violence, as well as the death of someone important to them.
The experiment had two steps.
Step one: remembering words. The participants had to make an effort to remember a series of word pairs. Each pair consisted of a cue word (for example, “violin”) and two target words: one neutral word, “street,” and one negative word, “corpse.” At this stage, there was no difference in performance between the high-trauma and low-trauma groups.
Step two: “recall” and “do not recall.” This was the testing phase. When the cue word appeared in green, the participants were asked to recall the target word as quickly and accurately as possible. When the cue word appeared in red, they were told not to think of or say the target word. The results showed that the high-trauma group performed much better than the low-trauma group in the “do not recall” condition. Whether the word was neutral or negative, they were better able to restrain the response that would otherwise spring straight out of their mouths.
This suggests that the high-trauma group had stronger inhibitory control, whether faced with neutral or negative stimuli.
This study offers a new direction for treating PTSD. Perhaps training inhibitory control should be incorporated into future PTSD treatments.
References:
Hulbert, J. C., & Anderson, M. C. (2018). What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger: Psychological trauma and its relationship to enhanced memory control. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Explanation
- The articles in this “Psychology New Findings” short-course series were short popular-science essays and informal reflections written at the time to accompany the content of Zhichao Wei: A Course on New Findings in Psychology. They were published on Fantuan, a platform that has since shut down, and the original links no longer exist.
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