Your topic for this paper should focus on one of these specific research questions:
What do we know about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)? What psychological symptoms are associated with it, and what effective treatments exist today (if any) to manage those symptoms?
How do traumatic experiences in childhood impact us later in life? Do they affect our ability to cope with subsequent traumatic experiences (either positively or negatively)? Do they somehow make us prone to experience more trauma later in life, and if so, how might that happen?
Given your understanding of three main psychological theories (Psychodynamic/Freud, Humanistic/Rogers, Cognitive-Behavioral/Beck), how might an adult who’d been traumatized as a child be treated differently by a psychodynamic, humanistic, and cognitive-behavioral therapist? Which therapy orientation do you think would be most effective for this person, and why?
Given your understanding of stress, the ‘fight-or-flight’ response and the neurological processes associated with it, what makes some events in life more difficult to cope with than others? Why are some people more capable of coping with stressful situations than others? Is the ability to cope with stress related to personality, intelligence, or some other variable?
