Spontaneous and Deliberate Dissociative States in Military Personnel: Relationships to Objective Performance Under Stress

We recently distinguished between spontaneous and deliberate dissociative states in military personnel exposed to stressful survival training, demonstrating not only that a substantial subset of participants 13 deliberately dissociate under intense stress but also that most deliberate dissociators 76 find it helpful facilitative to coping. In this brief report, we examine the relationship between spontaneous and deliberate subtypes of dissociation, and objective military performance in Special Forces and non-Special Forces personnel enrolled in Survival School. Inverse relationships between dissociation and military performance were observed in both Special Forces and general soldier subgroups. Military performance did not differ between spontaneous and deliberate dissociators, nor did it differ between those who appraised dissociative states as facilitative versus debilitative to stress coping. This study evolves our understanding of factors influencing human performance in the high-stakes survival context. Synthesizing these findings with our prior report, we now know that some military members intentionally dissociate under stress and this deliberate dissociation appears to positively influence stress coping, but its effect on objective human performance is yet to be determined.