Year: 2019
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Exposure to media coverage of mass violence has been shown to predict poorer mental health symptomology. However, it is unknown whether such media coverage can have ubiquitous effects on average community members, extending to biological and perceptual processes that underlie everyday decision making and behavior. Here, we used a repeated-measures design over the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings to track participants' self-reported distress, their eye blink startle reactivity while viewing images of the bombings, and their ability to perceptually distinguish armed from unarmed individuals in a behavioral shooting task. We leveraged a computational linguistics method in which we sampled news content from the sources our participants most commonly self-reported reading, and then quantified both the extent of news coverage about the marathon and the affective tone of that news coverage. Results revealed that participants experienced greater current distress, greater physiological reactivity to threats, and poorer perceptual sensitivity when recent news coverage of the marathon contained more affectively negative words. This is the first empirical work to examine relationships between the media's affective tone in its coverage of mass violence and individuals' threat perception and physiological threat reactivity.
Source: PLoS ONE
Institutions: University of New Hampshire, University of Pittsburgh, Northeastern University, Charles River Analytics (United States), Massachusetts General Hospital, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital, Center for Health Optimization and Implementation Research
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,595
Awards: Collaborative Research: Threat Perception Following Mass Violence Events, G2353241735, G3501703042, Collaborative Research: Threat Perception Following Mass Violence Events, G4514916602, Collaborative Research: Collective Sense Making Following a Terrorist Attack: The Immediate and Long-Term Impact on Public Resilience, RAPID: Threat Perception on the First Anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombings, G6639378493
OpenAlex ID: W2931836357