Crisis support, attributional style, coping style, and post-traumatic symptoms

Abstract

Although disaster is believed to be aetiological in the development of post-traumatic stress disorder, there exist large unexplained individual differences in the severity and chronicity of symptoms. For this reason, attention has begun to focus on those variables that might mediate between disaster and subsequent outcome. One such variable is crisis support. However, it has been suggested that associations between self-report measures of support and symptoms may be a function of attributional style and coping style. It is shown in the present study that crisis support is able to predict symptoms over and above attributional style and coping style.