Sadness shifts to anxiety over time and distance from the national tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut

Psychological Science
Bruce DoréKevin N Ochsner

Abstract

How do increasing temporal and spatial distance affect the emotions people feel and express in response to tragic events? Standard views suggest that emotional intensity should decrease but are silent on changes in emotional quality. Using a large Twitter data set, we identified temporal and spatial patterns in use of emotional and cognitive words in tweets about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Although use of sadness words decreased with time and spatial distance, use of anxiety words showed the opposite pattern and was associated with concurrent increases in language reflecting causal thinking. In a follow-up experiment, we found that thinking about abstract causes (as opposed to concrete details) of this event similarly evoked decreased sadness but increased anxiety, which was associated with perceptions that a similar event might occur in the future. These data challenge current theories of emotional reactivity and identify time, space, and abstract causal thinking as factors that elicit categorical shifts in emotional responses to tragedy.

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Citations

Sep 24, 2015·International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research·Lian Van Der KriekePeter De Jonge
Dec 15, 2016·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Roland G BenoitMichael C Anderson
Feb 6, 2017·Consciousness and Cognition·Adam BulleyThomas Suddendorf
Jul 26, 2018·Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking·Fang WangLei Cheng
Jan 10, 2019·Stress and Health : Journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress·Anoushka D Shahane, Bryan T Denny
Jul 6, 2019·Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness·Dhivya KarmegamBagavandas Mappillairajan
May 31, 2017·Risk Analysis : an Official Publication of the Society for Risk Analysis·Yu-Ru LinXidao Wen
Apr 1, 2016·Social and Personality Psychology Compass·Bruce P DoréKevin N Ochsner
Oct 9, 2019·Journal of Traumatic Stress·Nickolas M JonesRoxane Cohen Silver
Jun 15, 2017·Journal of Medical Internet Research·Liza Gg van LentEnny Das
Dec 8, 2020·Journal of Health Communication·Janet Z Yang, Cass McAllister
Jul 13, 2021·Frontiers in Psychology·Lewend Mayiwar, Fredrik Björklund
Jul 17, 2017··Ceri HughesDevin Conathan

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Software Mentioned

Twitter Streaming Application Programming Interface ( API
R
Stata
OpenStreetMap
Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count ( LIWC )
Mechanical Turk
mgcv

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