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CHAPTER 6
suppression tasks (Bomyea, Amir 2011). Our finding of dissociative personality state differences in WM has potential clinical implications as, in TPS, patients are prone to relive traumatic memories. In DID treatment, clinicians aim to generate a wider field of consciousness in TPS and promote WM functioning. TPS could be assisted by either using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) (Shapiro 1996) or exposure techniques to decrease the emotionality and vividness of the traumatic memories.
Poor inhibitory control has been associated with intrusive thoughts (Bomyea, Amir 2011) and improvement of working memory is believed to relate to enhanced emotion regulation (Engen, Kanske 2013, Bomyea, Lang 2016). It has been suggested that acquisition of adaptive emotion regulation strategies is a plausible mechanism of change in psychotherapy (Moyal et al. 2015). Differences in vulnerability to unwanted intrusive cognitions have been found before and suggest that a higher working memory capacity is related to having fewer intrusive thoughts (Rosen, Engle 1998, Brewin, Smart 2005). A superior ability of individuals using repression to avoid intrusive thoughts can be explained largely by their higher working memory capacity (Geraerts et al. 2007). Schweizer et al. (2013) showed that training emotional working memory successfully enhanced the efficiency of the prefrontal parietal network, highlighting the potential of emotional working memory training for clinical groups with impoverished affective cognitive control. A recent pilot study (Saunders et al. 2015) investigated the feasibility of treating people suffering from PTSD and poor working memory by employing working memory training and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). After treatment, the four participants in the study showed clinically significant improvements on a range of cognitive and emotional performance measures. Also, findings from another recent study (Bogdanov, Schwabe 2016) point to tDCS as a promising tool to reduce cognitive deficits related to working memory in, among others, post-traumatic stress disorder. It has been stated that effective interventions for youth with PTSD should target improved function of frontolimbic networks (Carrion, Wong 2012). Treatment outcome research using these potential markers can help develop more focused interventions that target the impaired learning of vulnerable youth experiencing traumatic stress. Diminished ability to control proactive interference may contribute to re-experiencing symptoms and has been proposed as a novel intervention target in PTSD (Bomyea, Stein & Lang 2015). PTSD re-experiencing symptoms and interference control performance improved significantly more for individuals in the interference
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