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Catastrophizing is associated with subjective, but not objective, prospective memory in treatment-seeking veterans

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Donni Staley¹ (dstaley@ucla.edu), Barbara Knowlton¹, Delany Thrasher^2,3, Sabine Kunrath², Kevin Bickart³, Joshua Goldberg², Mercy Huang², Robert Asarnow^1,2; ¹University of California, Los Angeles, ²Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, ³David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

Prospective memory (PM), the ability to remember and act on future intentions, is often impaired in treatment-seeking veterans. However, the specific mechanisms underlying these PM difficulties remain unclear. In this study, we used linear regressions to investigate whether objective and self-reported PM correlates with the severity of several common comorbidities experienced by this population, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, cognitive catastrophizing, and history of traumatic brain injury (TBI). We used the Prospective Memory Concerns Questionnaire (PMCQ) to measure self-reported PM and a modified Royal Prince Alfred Prospective Memory Test (RPA) to measure objective PM. We found that cognitive catastrophizing (modified version of the post-concussion symptom catastrophizing scale) was the sole significant predictor of self-reported PM performance, whereas nothing correlated with objective PM performance. Among the PMCQ subscales, cognitive catastrophizing best predicted the Memory Concerns and Forgetting Behaviors subscales, but not Retrieval Failures. Among the cognitive catastrophizing subscales, Helplessness was the strongest predictor of PMCQ scores. These findings highlight the potential role of problematic thinking patterns, particularly helplessness, in shaping veterans’ subjective experiences of prospective memory difficulties. Interventions that target catastrophic thinking may therefore alleviate perceived cognitive dysfunction, even when objective PM ability may remain intact. Overall, this study underscores the importance of distinguishing between subjective and objective PM impairments and suggests that catastrophizing represents a key psychological factor contributing to perceived memory problems in clinical veteran populations.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Other