A new Yale-led study released last week revealed that the ability to form relationships is one of the strongest ways to avoid post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans.
Robert Pietrzak at Yale authored the report. He says the findings also suggest that treatments targeting relationships can help with PTSD symptoms. But there is still a lot of work to be done.
“There are all of these other characterologic factors. There’s broader environmental factors. There’s systemic factors. There’s socioeconomic factors. All of these things are operating in very complex ways and are getting under our skin,” Pietrzak said.
Researchers used psychological and genetic data from U.S. military veterans to identify PTSD.
Pietrzack says the next step will be to better understand what other environmental factors can help avoid PTSD. He says so far, nurture is ahead of nature in this psychological experiment.