Hypervigilance in College Students: Associations With Betrayal and Dissociation and Psychometric Properties in a Brief Hypervigilance Scale

Betrayal trauma theory (Freyd, 1994, 1996) proposes that traumas high in social betrayal are expected to lead to psychological outcomes of dissociation, amnesia, and/or shame because these responses are adaptive to a survivor trying to preserve a necessary relationship in the face of mistreatment. Within the field of trauma studies more generally, there is substantial support for the proposition that traumas that cause intense fear should lead to posttraumatic anxiety and hypervigilance. Despite ample evidence for both theorized causal pathways, very few studies have tested associations between betrayal exposure, hypervigilance, and dissociation. The current study had 2 aims: first, as no self-report measure of hypervigilance had been developed for nonveteran populations, we sought to identify a subset of Hypervigilance Questionnaire (Knight, 1993) items that validly and reliably measure hypervigilance within college undergraduates (n 489; 62.6 % female, 69.9 % Caucasian) with and without elevated levels of posttraumatic stress. Second, we tested the associations among trauma history, hypervigilance, and dissociation. Psychometric analyses revealed 5 hypervigilance items we introduce as the Brief Hypervigilance Scale. Partial correlations revealed that each posttraumatic response was not related to a history of low betrayal trauma (i.e. non-interpersonal trauma) controlling for betrayal trauma (i.e. interpersonal trauma), but was related to betrayal trauma controlling for low betrayal trauma. These associations remained significant after controlling for the other posttraumatic response (i.e. hypervigi-lance or dissociation). Follow-up analyses revealed that hypervigilance was independently associated with adult, but not child high betrayal trauma, and the opposite was true for dissociation. Implications for theory, research, and clinical practice are discussed