Transgenerational transmission of trauma: investigating cognitive, emotional and behavioral forms of transmission among Marmara Earthquake survivors

The present study examined transgenerational transmission of trauma over 1999 Marmara Earthquake on children of survivors in terms of metacognitive, emotional and behavioral aspects. Transmission was inferred by looking at two things. First, whether parental earthquake-related memories were transmitted to the next generation was investigated. To do that, to what extent severity of parental exposure to earthquake was related to the child's inclusion of earthquake memory into his/her biographical knowledge about the parent was measured. Second, whether parental trauma was transmitted to the next generation via some metacognitive, emotional and behavioral outcomes was examined. Participants were assigned to trauma and comparison group based on whether their parents directly experienced the 1999 Earthquake in Kocaeli (Gölcük, İzmit, Karamürsel, Derince) or not. When adolescences were asked to recall 10 most important events from their parent's life, 65.6% of trauma group and 5.5% of comparison group included 1999 Marmara Earthquake events. However, trauma and comparison group children did not significantly differ from each other on metacognition, emotion regulation, internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. These results indicated that although earthquake related traumatic experiences were transmitted to the next generations through memories, negative impacts of these experiences did not reveal about themselves via next generations' metacognitive emotional and behavioral problems as measured by quantitative scales.