The purpose of this study was to reveal the general prevalence of PTSD symptoms among rescue workers for two time points: just after the traumatic operation after the Great East Japan Earthquake (Time 1) and seven months or one year after the earthquake (Time 2). We also aimed to examine the effect of the casual conversation about the critical incident on PTSD symptoms and mental condition of rescue workers. The participants were 5 rescue divers and 16 Special Rescue Team (SRT) of Japan Coast Guard (JCG) and 52 local firefighters of disaster area. They answered the questionnaire from November 2011 to March 2012 at voluntary basis. Traumatic stress responses were assessed for two time points (Time 1 and Time 2) with Japanese version of Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R-J, Asukai et al., 2002). The participants answered Time 1 as past reaction, and Time 2 as the current condition. The results revealed that 28.8 % of firefighters, 6.3 % of SRT and 20% of rescue divers were categorized as high risk of PTSD at Time 1, and 13.5 % of firefighters were categorized as high risk at Time 2 and all SRT and rescue divers of JCG were categorized as low risk at Time 2. The results of this study presented that the conversation about the trauma had no effect on PTSD symptoms and mental condition. However, the conversation about the critical incident would work to improve PTSD symptoms and mental condition since it seems to play a key role at the point in the past when people are sharing the experience.

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The purpose of this study was to develop the scale to measure the level of symmetry-complementarity (Bateson, 1936) in dyadic conversation and to test the reliability and the validity of the scale. I developed the 25 questionnaire items and selected 13 items based on the result of item-total correlation analysis. The Cronbach’s coefficient alpha of the scale was .87, the intra-class correlation coefficients was .58 (p <.01) and the correlation between the total scores of the SSCC and actual communication score evaluated by the coding system (FRCCCS ; Heatherington & Friedllander, 1987) was .64 (p<.01). The results indicated that the Scale on Symmetry and Complementarity in Conversation (SSCC) possesses high internal consistency, inter-rater reliability and criterion-referenced validity.

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