Discipline: Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
Subcategory: Social Sciences/Psychology/Economics
Session: 3
Room: Exhibit Hall A
Kaitlin Chacon - University of Colorado Denver
Co-Author(s): Adam Fay, SUNY Oswego; Emily Bovier, SUNY Oswego; Brooks B. Gump, Syracuse University
Neurodevelopmental research now suggests that 10 to 24 years of age corresponds most closely to the adolescent growth period, extending the age of adolescence beyond the popular understanding of this life stage. This longer developmental period is justified by our new understanding of brain developmental, especially the prefrontal cortex. However, adolescents are allowed to join the military as young as 17 years old and are treated as adults when being a service member. Trauma research has yet to consider how the still developing brain moderates the effects of PTSD symptomology following trauma. What considerations should be made to the military population in cognitive development, but more so how does it affect PTSD rates and clinical treatments? We hypothesized that due to normative underdevelopment of the frontal cortex in younger adults, age may moderate the effects PTSD symptomology following a traumatic episode while serving. In a sample of 35 veterans, we found that age significantly predicted PTSD symptoms; however, the results showed that veterans younger than 25 years of age at the time of combat exposure reported lower levels of PTSD symptoms than veterans older than 25 years of age. Therefore, we believe that age is a moderator of PTSD symptoms and that prefrontal cortex development is linked to either post-traumatic growth after trauma in military service or more severe symptoms that would lead to a clinical PTSD diagnosis. Future work will apply the same methodology to a larger sample of data from the Marine Resiliency Study. This project was developed as part of Syracuse University’s ‘Veteran Trauma Research Experience Undergraduate Fellowship’ funded by National Science Foundation.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): National Science Foundation
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Brooks Gump, bbgump@syr.edu
Role: I did the literature review of neurodevelopment as well as how it is applied to the military population or lack thereof. I then designed the model for the experiment and found a preexisting data set of veterans from different wars and applied the model to their data by using SPSS.