Knitting by the guillotine

Madame Defarge and the other women who knitted while they watched people being guillotined during the French Revolution were probably not troubled by flashbacks of the event afterwards.

Dr Emily Holmes, currently at the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, and the Traumatic Stress Clinic, London, presented her work on post-traumatic stress on Thursday 15 April 2004, at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society's Division of Clinical Psychology at Imperial College, London.

She described a study in which 51 student volunteers agreed to watch a film containing distressing scenes of road traffic accident victims. A third of them were asked to tap out a complex five-key sequence on a keypad while they watched. The volunteers then kept diaries for a week to record any intrusive memories of the film. Those who had carried out the tapping task were found to have experienced fewer intrusions than a control group who had watched the film with no task.

However, not all tasks performed during the film are helpful in reducing intrusions. In a later experiment 60 new volunteers watched the same film, and 20 were asked to count down in threes from 958 while watching. In contrast to the previous study, this group experienced more intrusive memories than the control group.

Dr Holmes said: "How people form a memory of a traumatic event effects how volatile it will be and how likely it is that they will experience intrusive images of that trauma. What people are doing when a traumatic event takes place can affect how memories are formed."

She added: "This research is at an early stage, but it does suggest there may be a psychological way to help reduce intrusive memories after a trauma. It would be interesting to examine the use of these tasks in settings like accident and emergency departments. A psychological task could be within an individual's control, non invasive and cost effective."

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