Center for Research in Neuropsychology and Cognitive Behavioral Intervention

CHARACTERIZATION: self-report trauma questionnaire comprising 29 different traumatic experiences with a 4 answer types, including the presence of the traumatic experience (1 or 0), onset age (first six years of life or later), the trauma duration (less/ more than one year), and the impact of the experiences (1 = none to 5 = very much). It assesses 5 types of trauma and 4 types of problems: emotional neglect, emotional abuse, body threat, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse (by parents and others), serious family problems (e.g., alcoholism, poverty, psychiatric problems of a member of family), death or loss of a family member, body harm, and war experiences. STRUCTURE AND SCORING: It is recommended the use of Nihenhuis syntax available at http://www.enijenhuis.nl/tec/ The syntax computes two indexes (overall index of number of traumas experienced resulting from the sum of all items, and the total area of traumatic presence which is the sum of the 5 traumatic experiences areas); and three trauma severity indexes (determined by the impact of trauma and age when it occurred, and assembled into emotional, physical, and sexual trauma). The severity of total trauma can range from 0 to 13 (neglect and emotional abuse, physical abuse, and sexual harassment or abuse) or from 0 to 24 (body threat, pain, and bizarre/strange punishment). The syntax also allows computing the psychosocial context in which the trauma occurred (within the family of origin, or by external elements of the family). PSICOMETRIC CHARACTERISTICS: P-TEC reliability was high (Cronbach α = 0.93) in a clinical sample. CUTOFF SCORE: An optimal cutoff point of 5.5 traumatic presences distinguished between clinical and non-clinical patients (AUC = 0.87, p < 0.001).