Posttraumatic Growth Development: Core Belief Disruption, Event Centrality, and Time Since Traum

Posttraumatic growth describes positive changes that individuals may experience in the aftermath of traumatic events that have significantly disrupted their core beliefs about themselves and their understanding of the world. Alternate models of posttraumatic growth have challenged the conceptualization of posttraumatic growth as personality change, in part due to lack of research that supports a relationship between the development of posttraumatic growth and the amount of time since the traumatic experience, and factors related to the development of posttraumatic growth. Recent research on the role that event centrality plays in the development of posttraumatic growth is promising (e.g., Johnson & Boals, 2014). This research study explores the relationship between posttraumatic growth and time since traumatic experience by taking event centrality and a related construct, core belief disruption, into consideration. Differences in posttraumatic growth between individuals with high or low event centrality and core belief disruption were compared. Differences in event centrality, core belief disruption, and posttraumatic growth were compared based on the amount of time since the traumatic experience for individuals who have experienced trauma in the past year.