Fear and Anxiety
More psychological research on our reaction to terrorism and mass violence:
The researchers collected posts on Twitter made in response to the 2012 shooting attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. They looked at tweets about the school shooting over a five-and-a-half-month period to see whether people used different language in connection with the event depending on how geographically close they were to Newtown, or how much time had elapsed since the tragedy. The analysis showed that the further away people were from the tragedy in either space or time, the less they used words related to sadness (loss, grieve, mourn), suggesting that feelings of sorrow waned with growing psychological distance. But words related to anxiety (crazy, fearful, scared) showed the opposite pattern, increasing in frequency as people gained distance in either time or space from the tragic events. For example, within the first week of the shootings, words expressing sadness accounted for 1.69 percent of all words used in tweets about the event; about five months later, these had dwindled to 0.62 percent. In contrast, anxiety-related words went up from 0.27 percent to 0.62 percent over the same time.
Why does psychological distance mute sadness but incubate anxiety? The authors point out that as people feel more remote from an event, they shift from thinking of it in very concrete terms to more abstract ones, a pattern that has been shown in a number of previous studies. Concrete thoughts highlight the individual lives affected and the horrific details of the tragedy. (Images have >particular power to make us feel the loss of individuals in a mass tragedy.) But when people think about the event abstractly, they’re more apt to focus on its underlying causes, which is anxiety inducing if the cause is seen as arising from an unresolved issue.
This is related.
Wm • February 16, 2016 9:02 AM
There is probably going to be geographical differences that are not being taken into account here. For instance, here in Texas, we have a strong tendency to react by reasoning that allowing concealed carry licensed citizens, or at least allowing teachers to carry guns in schools, is the answer to stopping such violence in such no gun zones. Whereas in the more liberal north eastern U.S., people will be more likely to be overcome with emotional responses, later leading to fears and further emotional demands for gun bans. No one will ever placated or ended anxiety and evil by lying down, disarming all citizens, and/or submitting to it.