Interpersonal impact of veterans with PTSD and moral injury: Exploring how significant others perceive veterans undergoing a positive psychology intervention
Abstract
Given the risk for veterans with PTSD and moral injury to experience negative social consequences, researchers have increasingly focused on social functioning assessment; however, one gap is the lack of observer-rated assessment and reliance on self-report measures. To better understand the dynamic process of social functioning and how it is affected by PTSD and moral injury distress, it is important to gain perspective on how others perceive those veterans and their interactions. Interpersonal circumplex assessments, such as the Impact Message Inventory-Circumplex (IMI-C), may provide that perspective by asking others to rate observations of veterans’ social behaviors, which is scored in a circular pattern of eight octants representing unique blends of two orthogonal dimensions: affiliation (cold-warm) and control (dominant-submissive). This study demonstrated how the IMI-C can be used to examine significant others’ perceptions of veterans with PTSD and moral injury at baseline (n = 23), prior to a novel positive psychology treatment that focused on inducing moral elevation and its benefits. Using this fine-grained analysis of interpersonal behaviors, this study also described two case studies of veterans who demonstrated notable pre-post changes in how they were perceived by others, providing contextual information including quantitative changes in PTSD symptoms, moral injury, and quality of life, and qualitative reports of interpersonal changes. Preliminary findings suggest significant others characterized veterans’ impact as mostly warm and neither dominant or submissive at baseline. Case examples also suggest meaningful interpersonal shifts in two veterans who found benefit in the moral elevation-based intervention. Lastly, clinical and research implications are discussed.
Adam P. McGuire
Assistant Professor of Psychology
