Terrorism & mediaExposure to media coverage of terrorist acts, disasters may cause long-term negative health effects

The city of Boston endured one of the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in April of 2013, when two pressure-cooker bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. While emergency workers responded to the chaos and law enforcement agencies began a manhunt for the perpetrators, Americans fixed their attention to television screens, Internet news sites and forums, and Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.

In doing so, some of those people may have been raising their acute stress levels, with a corresponding increase in symptoms such as difficulty sleeping, a sense of emotional numbness, or re-experiencing their trauma. Such responses, exhibited shortly after exposure to a trauma, have been linked with long-term negative health effects.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) reports that a trio of researchers in psychology and social behavior and nursing science at the University of California, Irvine — supported by the Social Psychology Program in NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate — released a paper last year finding that for some individuals, intense exposure to the Boston Marathon bombing through media coverage could be associated with more stress symptoms than those who had direct exposure to the attack. Their latest research article, published this month, finds that the likelihood of those symptoms developing also increases with multiple exposures to prior trauma.

In other words, the more hours you spend following disasters and tragedies in the media, the more sensitized you may become.

“Media-based exposure to these large, collective traumas — these community disasters — can have cumulative effects on people,” said Dana Rose Garfin, one of the paper’s authors. “More prior indirect exposures are associated with higher stress responses following subsequent traumatic events.”

Garfin, E. Alison Holman and Roxane Cohen Silver used survey results from residents of metropolitan Boston and New York City collected within weeks of the Marathon bombing to examine the relationship between how they responded to the attack and their media-based exposure to three previous traumatic events: the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Superstorm Sandy, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

“We were able to specifically explore the accumulation of exposure to collective disasters,” Silver said. “We looked at three different, collective events to which people on the East Coast — and in particular New York and Boston — have been exposed.”