Certain limitations should be kept in mind when interpreting the results from the current investigation. First, although the higher rate of PTSD in women who experienced assaultive versus only non-assaultive traumas supports the validity of this distinction as a crude severity indicator, we expect that a more direct measure of severity (e.g. subjective ratings of distress) would be more accurate. Second, our use of retrospective reports introduced potential retrospective reporting biases, although the adjustments made for age at time of report for all three phenotypes likely reduced their impact. Third, although integrating data from earlier waves of data collection and other sections of the interview with the Wave 4 trauma checklist enhanced the accuracy in establishing trauma status, only individuals who endorsed events on the trauma checklist (which, unlike the questions from early home environment and sexual maturation questions, were not worded behaviorally) were assessed for PTSD. As a result, PTSD diagnoses were missing for this subset of the sample. Fourth, although highly comparable to the lifetime prevalence of trauma exposure reported in studies using similar definitions, the rate of
