THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRAUMA & SELF-CONTROL

Abstract

Self-control is defined as the ability to control one's thoughts and actions (Walter et al., 2010). It is an essential aspect of the human personality that begins its development in childhood and continues across the lifespan (Mischel et al., 1989). Self-control can help someone maintain a relationship, and sometimes it can make the difference between life and death for an individual. Research has shown many factors that both help and hinder the development of self-control, but a significant factor that is prevalent worldwide is trauma (Jaffee & Maikovich-Fong, 2010). Trauma is defined as an emotional response resulting from an event or circumstance that an individual experiences as physically/emotionally harmful or life-threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual's functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2019). Trauma has been found to have a substantial effect on the psychological and biological wellbeing of individuals (Henschel et al., 2013), and one of the essential aspects of wellbeing is self-control. The present study seeks to explore the relationship between trauma and self-control through correlational analysis. Participants (n = 60) were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. They completed four questionnaires: the Adverse Childhood Experience Questionnaire to measure trauma, the Brief Self-control Scale to measure self-reported self-control, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire to measure cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, and the Kirby Delay-Discounting Questionnaire to measure task-based self-control. It was hypothesized that reported trauma would correlate negatively with self-control. The correlational analysis found that self-reported trauma correlated positively with self-reported self-control, and self-reported trauma correlated negatively with task-based self-control. Overall, it was found that there is a relationship between trauma and self-control through both positive and negative correlations. The results also imply that the difference between self-reported self-control and task-based self-control is significant. Future research should study those intricacies in order to further develop skills for early childhood prevention of trauma and trauma recovery.