Doctoral Dissertation Research: The effects of psychic trauma on the narratives of emotions in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

研究生Allen L Tran在Thomas Csordas博士的指导下，将在越南胡志明市进行一项关于越南战争退伍军人文化和创伤后应激的认知人类学研究。他将调查一个假设，即患有PTS的人与没有PTS的人在如何解释生活中的日常情感事件方面存在差异。他在对PTS和美国退伍军人的其他研究的基础上发现，PTS的潜在原因之一是无法理解事件的意义。研究将在越南胡志明市的三个不同地区进行：一个快速变化的地区，一个贫困地区和一个中产阶级地区。研究人员将从政府住房名单中随机选择参与者样本，并使用标准的认知人类学技术采访他们，以确定当地情绪类别及其相关估值。他还将管理为在美国的越南人开发的心理量表，以确定哪些参与者患有PTS，哪些没有。最后，他将从每个小组征求情感事件的叙述。我们将分析这些叙述是如何利用情感框架的。其他研究人员发现，现在生活在美国的越南退伍军人患PTS的可能性低于美国退伍军人。这项研究可以帮助我们理解其中的原因，这对社会有益；理解PTS和文化之间的关系可以帮助政策制定者和那些与退伍军人一起工作的人。该研究还将从非西方文化的角度扩展创伤理论，从而有助于科学地理解暴力、文化和情感之间的关系。

Graduate student Allen L Tran, supervised by Dr. Thomas Csordas, will undertake a cognitive anthropological study of culture and Post Traumatic Stress among Vietnamese Vietnam War veterans in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He will investigate the hypothesis that those with PTS differ from those without it in how they interpret everyday emotional events in their lives. He builds on other research on PTS and American veterans, which found that one of the underlying causes of PTS is the inability to make meaning of events. The research will be conducted in three different districts of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: a district undergoing rapid change, a poor district, and a middle class district. The researcher will choose a random sample of participants from government housing lists and interview them with standard cognitive anthropological techniques to determine local categories of emotions and their associated valuations. He also will administer psychological scales developed for Vietnamese in the United States to determine which participants have PTS and which do not. Finally, he will solicit narratives of emotional events from each group. The narratives will be analyzed for how they make use of the emotional frameworks. Other researchers have found that Vietnamese veterans who now live in the United States are less likely to suffer from PTS than are American veterans. This research may help us to understand why, which would be of social benefit; understanding the relationship between PTS and culture could aid policy makers and those who work with veterans. The study also will expand theories of trauma with perspectives from a non-Western culture and thereby contribute to scientific understanding of the relations between violence, culture, and emotions.