The adverse impact of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on the developing mind in adolescence can extend well into adulthood. The developmental malleability of cognitive control capacity in this age group, however, may hold particular promise for cognitive training interventions. The present study investigated the effects of affective working memory (aWMT) compared to placebo-training on cognitive and affective functioning in adolescents with PTSD. 30 treatment-seeking adolescents trained for 20 days on either an affective dual n-back task (aWMT; n = 15) or a feature match task (placebo; n = 15). The aWMT group showed greater pre-to post-training increases in cognitive control as measured by the GoNogo task as well as improvements in symptoms of PTSD and increased use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies. These preliminary findings are promising given the potential for free and easy dissemination of the aWMT in schools and online.

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The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) is an established self-reported measure of emotion regulation difficulties. Recently, a brief 16-item version of this scale—the DERS-16—was developed. The goal of the present study was to extend the research on the DERS-16 by evaluating the reliability and validity of the Persian version in a university sample ( N = 201). Results demonstrate that the Persian DERS-16 demonstrated excellent internal consistency, good test–retest reliability, and good concurrent validity. Furthermore, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) supported the proposed factor structure. Thus, the Persian DERS-16 may offer a valid method for the assessment of overall emotion regulation difficulties as well as for the different facets of the construct.

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