SPE: About PTSD, not personality
New psychological studies suggest that memory may play a key role in the development of PTSD after trauma. To date, studies investigating this have been limited to examining participants through the use of fear-learning tasks on the computer and thus have been limited in their generalizability to real-life situations. However, a study done in the past may have already alluded to these deficits and their role in the development of PTSD symptoms.
Forty-seven years ago, Philip Zimbardo conducted his infamous experiment, simulating a real prison environment at Stanford University. At the end of this experiment, Zimbardo concluded that personality is drastically shaped by an individual’s environment.
Many psychologists and journalists have since then torn apart his findings, describing them as ungeneralizable, mainly due to the fact that he recruited only college-aged males who volunteered which may indicate already aggressive personalities to begin with. Since ethical standards have been rightfully raised after the conclusion of this study, there have been no attempts to replicate the results. However, perhaps the experiment does not need to be redone, but rather examined with a different lens. The experiment, when looking at the guards and their actions is clearly fraught with design flaws and manipulation, but with respect to the prisoners there could be valid findings.
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Connecting past and current research is vital to the understanding of how mental illnesses work and in developing new research studies and questions. By looking at the experiment through the eyes of a PTSD-researcher, it may be possible to glean valuable information and add a new aspect to the classic experiment.
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This experiment offers a unique observation of the manifestation of PTSD-like behavior. The participants were interviewed before-hand with a personality questionnaire, then were traumatized (or as Zimbardo would say humiliated and degraded for the purpose of immersion into prison), and were then observed for their behaviors during and after the trauma. In research, this is impossible to do, as PTSD only manifests after the trauma and there is little way to suggest who will develop it and who will not, among the host of other ethical and moral issues. Through this experiment it is possible to apply the current research to a simulated trauma environment.
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If it were memory and contextualizing deficits that contributed to PTSD (which recent research supports), it would explain why the prisoners seemed to forget that it was just an experiment and not a real prison. The prisoners suffered severe trauma, in some cases leading to mental breakdowns which caused experimenters to remove them from the experiment. Other prisoners planned an escape, and there were whispers of a rebellion among the prisoners. All of this leads to the conclusion that the prisoners really thought they were in a prison.
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Current theories in the development of PTSD point to deficits in the ability to use context clues and memories to distinguish safe stimuli from dangerous ones. Research studies have shown that PTSD participants often forget stimuli that had been associated with the danger cue, and show no fear for that stimulus when presented with it later. More interestingly, they show fear in being presented with stimuli that had been associated with safety, or no danger. Though this research has been done with computer tasks, the SPE presents a unique opportunity to apply these findings.
The experiment showed that prisoners had difficulty remembering that it was only an experiment and had the option of withdrawing at any point in time. The trauma they were exposed to however, led to the majority developing PTSD-like symptoms which affected their ability to use the context clues of the experimental atmosphere to remind them of this fact.
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There is also some thought that this deficit in contextualization is also a risk factor for PTSD, which is then worsened by the trauma itself. Because this experiment consisted of such similar participants, it is possible to think that they might have all had this risk factor and thus explains the general extreme reaction they had to the conditions.
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Overall, while this experiment was truly horrific, some good can come of it, if looking with fresh eyes.