Political Prisoners. According to the American Psychiatric Association, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common psychological consequence of traumatic events that involve a threat to life or physical integrity. During the Cold War, some 200,000 people in East Germany were imprisoned for political reasons. Many were subjected to physical and psychological torture during their imprisonment, resulting in PTSD. A. Ehlers et al. studied various characteristics of political prisoners from the former East Germany and presented their findings in the paper “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Following Political Imprisonment: The Role of Mental Defeat, Alienation, and Perceived Permanent Change” (Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 109, pp. 45–55). The researchers randomly and independently selected 32 former prisoners diagnosed with chronic PTSD and 20 former prisoners that were diagnosed with PTSD after release from prison but had since recovered (remitted).

The ages, in years, at arrest yielded the following summary statistics.

Chronic Remitted x¯1 = 25.8 s1 = 9.2 n1 = 32 x¯2 = 22.1 s2 = 5.7 n2 = 20 At the 10% significance level, is there sufficient evidence to conclude that a difference exists in the mean age at arrest of East German prisoners with chronic PTSD and remitted PTSD?