Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Complex trauma is repeated exposure to traumatic events that result in severe mental and physical health consequences. Research has found that integrating narrative and emotion regarding trauma experience results in reduced physician-visits and mental well-being (Pennebaker, 2004). The Narrative-Emotion Process Coding System (NEPCS; Boritz et al., 2012), is a research and clinical tool that uses in-session linguistic and paralinguistic features to identify eight client markers that vary in narrative-emotion integration (i.e. uncontrollable crying to new understanding of the self). Thus far, the NEPCS has been validated in psychotherapy for depression (Boritz, 2012). The NEPCS has also been applied to four clients who received Emotion Focused Therapy for Trauma (EFTT; Carpenter et al., under review). Results found that clients who recovered from trauma disturbances articulated significantly more markers of narrative-emotion integration than clients that did not recover from trauma disturbances, who in fact expressed significantly more markers of narrative-emotion disintegration. Purpose: Full-scale investigation on the impact of NEPCS markers to treatment outcome in a complex trauma sample receiving EFTT. Hypothesis: recovered clients will express significantly more NEPCS markers of narrative emotion integration than unchanged clients, who will express significantly more markers of narrative emotion disintegration. Method: apply the NEPCS to videotaped therapy sessions of 12 recovered and 12 unchanged clients who received EFTT for childhood abuse (Paivio et al., 2010). Hierarchical Linear Modeling will compare the outcome groups on the proportion of the NEPCS markers. Next, task analysis will examine therapist interventions that facilitate narrative-emotion integration. This research is important as it will elucidate the benefits of narrative and emotion processes in trauma treatment and improve the health of complex trauma survivors.