Collaborative Research: Threat Perception Following Mass Violence Events

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Experiencing mass violence, terrorism, or other traumatic events can shape how individuals perceive and respond to their social world. Anecdotally, following extensive media coverage of mass violence events, many report perceiving objects, people, and situations as particularly threatening; and, as media coverage shifts to emphasize resilience and community cohesion, this hypervigilance for threats seems to dissipate. Karen Quigley (Northeastern University), Yu-Ru Lin (University of Pittsburgh) and their collaborators will empirically test how emotionally potent media coverage of a real-world threat alters threat perception (i.e., the perception of a potentially harmful event, situation or stimulus as present or imminent). Specifically, they will test the hypothesis that media coverage focusing on death and destruction caused by a serious real-world threat event will have a more detrimental impact on subsequent threat perception than media coverage of the same event that focuses on people's heroic responses to the threat. This work could reveal potential harmful real-world consequences of emotionally potent media reporting of a terrorism event as well as suggest methods for alleviating such effects (e.g., by reporting on positive responses to such tragedies, like the heroics of first responders). This work will also help characterize the types of individuals who are at greatest risk of altered threat perception after a mass violence or terrorism event or when media attention to such events increases. This project will examine the effects of real-world mass violence on threat perception among members of an affected community using multiple threat perception paradigms in the laboratory. A longitudinal study will be used to assess changes in threat perception before, during and after renewed media coverage near an upcoming anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, a potent real-world mass violence event that killed three and injured more than 250. The investigators will utilize novel media tracking measures to assess changes in exposure to media coverage of the bombings and threat-related events at both the community-wide and individual level. Specifically, the research will examine changes in threat perception as a result of (1) naturally-occurring changes in participants' exposure to actual media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings near an upcoming anniversary of the tragedy and (2) in-lab exposure to media-style vignettes about the bombings that are designed to specifically activate negative or positive concepts related to the tragedy. A second, cross-sectional study will examine responses to physical threats (i.e., guns) and social threats (i.e., scowling faces) shown outside of conscious awareness. This will test whether exposure and affective framing can influence the conscious detectability of physical and social threats. Taken together, this research will provide a better understanding of how real-world mass violence and the media response to it can influence basic perceptual mechanisms that underlie changes in every day judgments and behaviors among members of the affected communities.