Priscilla Hefley, a master’s student in the USC School of Social Work, knew she wanted to do research on trauma and its impact on the brain, but she had no idea where to start – until her professor Hazel Atuel suggested she look in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Hefley, who had assumed that studying the brain would involve “looking at a lot of brain scans,” was amazed when she began watching testimonies in the Visual History Archive. Joined by classmate Natalie Ferbezar, Hefley decided to watch testimony in order to study whether there are any cultural or universal markers of trauma that could be observed in survivors across the Holocaust, Rwandan Tutsi Genocide, Nanjing Massacre and Armenian Genocide.

Ferbezar and Hefley rated each testimony in a random sample according to a standardized checklist that physicians use to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They were looking for survivors’ descriptions of feelings of numbness and detachment, isolation, nightmares, and other symptoms at the time of their interview with USC Shoah Foundation.

They noticed immediately how difficult it was to identify items on the checklist in survivors’ testimonies. Survivors didn’t always state their symptoms clearly or fit the checklist’s idea of PTSD, which showed Hefley and Ferbezar the limitations of using such an impersonal method to diagnose PTSD.

“Human beings are not cut and dry,” Ferbezar said. “There is a need for social workers in the mental health field to think outside the box. Just because the checklist says one thing, that might not be the final answer. You need to know the person walking in the door.”

Hefley and Ferbezar have not drawn any definite conclusions yet about the universality of trauma across genocides, but the process did prove to them the importance of making research “person-driven” and creative. They are planning to present their research to the Society for Social Work and Research and hope future USC social work students can continue what they started.

Hefley and Ferbezar have graduated from USC and are going on to careers in social work at the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services and Volunteers of America, respectively, but their research in the Visual History Archive will stay with them, they said.

“Research doesn’t have to be dry,” Hefley said. “The Visual History Archive is one springboard of the many different multidisciplinary ways we can look at trauma across generations.”