Assessing the coherence of narratives of traumatic events with latent semantic analysis

Memories of traumatic events are thought to be less coherent than memories for nontraumatic events, and expressive writing about traumatic events may help create more organized, coherent memories. Investigations of traumatic memories have been hampered by limitations in conceptualizing and measuring memory organization and coherence. The objective of this investigation was to compare the coherence of written narratives of trauma and neutral memories and examine changes in coherence of trauma narratives as a function of repeated expressive writing about the trauma using an atheoretical, computational method for assessing the coherence of text.

Participants (N = 246) wrote 3 times about either their daily activities (neutral condition) or the most traumatic event of their lives. Latent semantic analysis, a method of calculating meaning from text based on semantic association between words, was used to assess narrative coherence as the average semantic association between contiguous sentences.

Neutral narratives were more coherent than trauma narratives overall, but neutral narratives decreased whereas trauma narratives increased in coherence from the first to the final session.

These findings provide evidence that memories for trauma experiences are less coherent than neutral memories and suggest that writing helps to create a more coherent representation of a traumatic event, highlighting a potential mechanism for expressive writing's effects. Results demonstrate the utility of latent semantic analysis for examining coherence of memories of traumatic events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).