2004/06/16 by Richard J. McNally, Natasha B. Lasko, Susan A. Clancy +3 · 1 citation
Medicine · Psychology · Neuroscience · #Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments #Traumatic Brain Injury Research #Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Research #Psychology #Skin conductance #Reactivity (psychology) #Recall #Psychophysiology #Scripting language #Cognitive psychology #Developmental psychology #Neuroscience #Medicine
paper · doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00707.x
openalex publication_date 2004/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
Is recollection of highly improbable traumatic experiences accompanied by psychophysiological responses indicative of intense emotion? To investigate this issue, we measured heart rate, skin conductance, and left lateral frontalis electromyographic responses in individuals who reported having been abducted by space aliens. Recordings of these participants were made during script-driven imagery of their reported alien encounters and of other stressful, positive, and neutral experiences they reported. We also measured the psychophysiological responses of control participants while they heard the scripts of the abductees. We predicted that if "memories" of alien abduction function like highly stressful memories, then psychophysiological reactivity to the abduction and stressful scripts would be greater than reactivity to the positive and neutral scripts, and this effect would be more pronounced among abductees than among control participants. Contrast analyses confirmed this prediction for all three physiological measures (ps < .05). Therefore, belief that one has been traumatized may generate emotional responses similar to those provoked by recollection of trauma (e.g., combat).