Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Differential Extinction Of Disgust And Anxiety Among Victims Of Sexual Traumatization, Christal Badour

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Emerging evidence suggests that in addition to fear, traumatic event-related disgust reactions may be integral to understanding the sequelae of sexual traumatization. Importantly, evidence broadly suggests compared to fear, disgust may be resistant to extinction. As such, conditioned disgust reactions may not evidence the same pattern of extinction observed with fear-based reactions. This may have important implications for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As such, the current study sought to fill an important gap in the existing literature by examining specific processes and mechanisms that are likely to affect outcomes of exposure-based interventions following sexual traumatization. Specifically, 72 …