Anticipatory awareness of emotionally charged targets by individuals with histories of emotional trauma

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Spring, 2004 by Theo K. de Graaf, Joop M. Houtkooper

In an adjacent room the experimenter had exhibited 12 potentially emotional targets consisting of 10 pictures selected from the Thematical Apperception Test (TAT), one newspaper photograph depicting a piggy roaming a secondary road after having escaped the slaughter of pigs in Malaysia, and a reproduction of Picasso's "Mother Nursing Her Child." Having completed the first two runs, the participants were invited to enter this room and to inspect the pictures. A questionnaire was handed out to them on which they had to answer questions as to which two pictures they found either (a) "shocking," (b) "comforting or appeasing," (c) "neutral," or (d) "arousing mixed feelings." (The titles of the pictures [see below] and their respective numbers, 1 through 12, were typed on the questionnaire.)

The same questionnaire also contained questions about possible traumatic experiences of both themselves and their parents. These items were taken from the Childhood Trauma Odds Inventory (ChTOI). The ChTOI had previously been used by the first author to estimate the probable extent of individual and transgenerational traumatization in patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, as well as in juvenile delinquents (Graaf, 1997a, 1998b; Graaf, Aghassy & Van Walbeek, 1993). On the basis of the answers to the questionnaire, two childhood trauma odds scores were constructed: (a) an actual childhood trauma score (ACTS), and (b) a transgenerational or possible childhood trauma score (TPCTS).

Actual psychotraumatic or psychotoxic childhood experiences that are open to objectification can be operationally defined as the occurrence of one or more of the following events or experiences: death of a parent or a sibling, or separation or divorce of the parents, all before the age of 18 years; separation from home for longer than 3 months when 5 to 15 years old, or longer than 1 month when less than 5 years old; physical abuse; sexual abuse; alcohol or drug addiction of one of the parents; psychiatric illness of one of the parents; violent quarrels between the parents; and so on.

Transgenerational or possible psychotraumatic or psychotoxic childhood experiences may be defined as the occurrence of one or more of the following circumstances: mother or father lost a parent or sibling before the age of 18 years, other traumatic separation of the parent from his or her parents, traumatic war experiences of father or mother (including having been a soldier in Korea, Vietnam, or the Gulf War), alcohol addiction of a grandparent, father or mother having felt abused or severely neglected in his or her own youth, a mother who has had an abortion, the parents having lost a child before the target person was born, the target person being an only child or an only girl or boy, mother being the eldest girl in her family, divorce or separation of grandparents, psychiatric illness of a grandparent, bad marriage of grandparents, rigorous religious upbringing of a parent, and so on.

While the participants were inspecting the 12 pictures after the second run, the experimenter opened a sealed envelope containing a sequence of 40 random numbers between 1 and 100, which had also been prepared by the pseudo-RNG. From this list the first 12 numbers were selected in such a way that the pictures were separated from each other by at least one Zener target on the 100-targets sheet (in order to preclude contamination by possible displacements belonging to two adjacent pictures). The experimenter noted the positions of the 12 pictures on a separate sheet and put this into his inside pocket.