BACKGROUND: The structure of trauma memories impacts mental health, but questions remain about how structure changes with time and may shape coping with trauma. This study considered the structure of trauma narratives collected during an emergency department (ED) visit and at one-year follow-up. We addressed change in narrative structure over time, the extent structure predicted twelve-month psychological symptoms, and possible mechanisms in coping responses. METHODS: Sixty-eight community adults (age range 18-67; 41% women) recruited from a trauma center ED provided narratives of the traumatic event that brought them to the ED. Participants provided multiple follow-up reports on psychological symptoms and coping strategies, and another narrative of the traumatic event at twelve months. RESULTS: Narrative structure improved over time. Baseline narrative structure was negatively associated with twelve-month depressive and posttraumatic symptoms. Two measures of trauma narrative structure-interpretive elaboration and coherence-predicted change in coping strategies. Interpretive elaboration (rich details of the subjective experience) promoted early gains in endorsed engagement and later declines in endorsed disengagement. Coherence (the overall thematic structure of the narrative) buffered participant endorsement of disengagement at earlier follow-ups. Engagement was tied with fewer reported symptoms, whereas disengagement was associated with higher reported symptoms. Coping served as a mediator between baseline narrative structure and later mental health. LIMITATIONS: The study sample was relatively small and depended on self-reports for symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest there is meaningful variability in trauma memory structure, and early recollections of traumatic experiences may improve targeting of individuals in need of active interventions.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments.