Media exposure to mass violence events can fuel a cycle of distress.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Thompson RR
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6469939 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description: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.
| S-EPMC6443148 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundViolence against women has become a global public health threat. Data on the potential impact of exposure to violence on cardiovascular disease are scarce.Methods and resultsWe evaluated the association between exposure to violence and subclinical cardiovascular disease in 634 disease-free women from the Mexican Teachers' Cohort who responded to violence-related items from the Life Stressor Checklist and underwent measures of carotid artery intima-media thickness in 2012 and 2013. We defined exposure to violence as having ever been exposed to physical and/or sexual violence. Intima-media thickness was log-transformed, and subclinical carotid atherosclerosis was defined as intima-media thickness ?0.8 mm or plaque. We used multivariable linear and logistic regression models adjusted for several potential confounders. Mean age was 48.9±4.3 years. Close to 40% of women reported past exposure to violence. The lifetime prevalence of sexual violence was 7.1%, and prevalence of physical violence was 23.5% (7.7% reported both sexual and physical violence). Relative to women with no history of violence, exposure to violence was associated with higher intima-media thickness (adjusted mean percentage difference=2.4%; 95% confidence interval 0.5, 4.3) and subclinical atherosclerosis (adjusted odds ratio=1.60; 95% confidence interval 1.10, 2.32). The association was stronger for exposure to physical violence, especially by mugging or physical assault by a stranger (adjusted mean % difference=4.6%; 95% confidence interval 1.8, 7.5, and odds ratio of subclinical carotid atherosclerosis=2.06; 95% confidence interval 1.22, 3.49).ConclusionsExposure to violence, and in particular assault by a stranger, was strongly associated with subclinical cardiovascular disease in Mexican middle-aged women.
| S-EPMC5586461 | biostudies-literature
Project description:[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213891.].
| S-EPMC8061993 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Governments and advocacy groups have drawn attention to the precarious position of those members of society who are unable to attain an adequate level of energy services, i.e. the fuel poor. Concerns have also arisen about the ability of fuel poor individuals to adapt to the hardship recently brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper contributes to the literature by exploring empirically the link between fuel poverty and financial distress prior to and during the first wave the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis is based on the most recent longitudinal, nationally representative survey of the United Kingdom, Understanding Society (UKHLS, Wave 10, January 2018-February 2020). After correcting for the effects of potential endogeneity in the variables of interest, our results identify a statistically robust relationship between fuel poverty indicators and self-reported measures of current financial distress, with stronger effects for subjective indicators. The fuel poverty indicators however exert only a limited influence on an individual's expectation of their future financial situation. Our analysis of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic also confirms that fuel poverty contributed to financial distress. Our main findings are robust to a suite of specification and sensitivity checks. Our results lead to recommend assessing measures which target fuel poverty on the basis of their potential indirect effect on financial distress.
| S-EPMC8479554 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Adolescents spend a significant part of their leisure time watching TV programs and movies that portray violence. It is unknown, however, how the extent of violent media use and the severity of aggression displayed affect adolescents' brain function. We investigated skin conductance responses, brain activation and functional brain connectivity to media violence in healthy adolescents. In an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, subjects repeatedly viewed normed videos that displayed different degrees of aggressive behavior. We found a downward linear adaptation in skin conductance responses with increasing aggression and desensitization towards more aggressive videos. Our results further revealed adaptation in a fronto-parietal network including the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC), right precuneus and bilateral inferior parietal lobules, again showing downward linear adaptations and desensitization towards more aggressive videos. Granger causality mapping analyses revealed attenuation in the left lOFC, indicating that activation during viewing aggressive media is driven by input from parietal regions that decreased over time, for more aggressive videos. We conclude that aggressive media activates an emotion-attention network that has the capability to blunt emotional responses through reduced attention with repeated viewing of aggressive media contents, which may restrict the linking of the consequences of aggression with an emotional response, and therefore potentially promotes aggressive attitudes and behavior.
| S-EPMC3190206 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Adolescents exposed to violence are at elevated risk of developing most forms of psychopathology, including depression, anxiety, and alcohol abuse. Prior research has identified emotional reactivity and difficulties with emotion regulation as core mechanisms linking violence exposure with psychopathology. Scant research has examined behavioral responses to distress as a mechanism in this association. This study examined the association of violence exposure with distress tolerance-the ability to persist in the face of distress-and whether lower distress tolerance linked violence exposure with subsequent increases in depression, anxiety, and alcohol abuse problems during adolescence. Data were collected prospectively in a sample of 287 adolescents aged 16-17 (44.3% male; 40.8% White). At Time 1, participants provided self-report of demographics, violence exposure, and psychopathology, and completed a behavioral measure of distress tolerance, the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task. Four months later, participants (n = 237) repeated the psychopathology assessments. Violence exposure was associated with lower distress tolerance (β = -.21 p = .009), and elevated concurrent psychopathology (β = .16-.45, p = .001-.004). Low distress tolerance was prospectively associated with greater likelihood of abusing alcohol over time (OR = .63, p = .021), and mediated the association between violence exposure and greater levels (β = .02, 95% CI [.001, .063]) and likelihood (OR = .03, 95% CI [.006, .065]) of alcohol use over time. In contrast, low distress tolerance was not associated concurrently or prospectively with internalizing symptoms. Results persisted after controlling for socio-economic status. Findings suggest that distress tolerance is shaped by early experiences of threat and plays a role in the association between violence exposure and development of problematic alcohol use in adolescence.
| S-EPMC8324573 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundMedia depictions of violence, although often claimed to induce viewer aggression, have not been shown to affect the cortical networks that regulate behavior.Methodology/principal findingsUsing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that repeated exposure to violent media, but not to other equally arousing media, led to both diminished response in right lateral orbitofrontal cortex (right ltOFC) and a decrease in right ltOFC-amygdala interaction. Reduced function in this network has been previously associated with decreased control over a variety of behaviors, including reactive aggression. Indeed, we found reduced right ltOFC responses to be characteristic of those subjects that reported greater tendencies toward reactive aggression. Furthermore, the violence-induced reduction in right ltOFC response coincided with increased throughput to behavior planning regions.ConclusionsThese novel findings establish that even short-term exposure to violent media can result in diminished responsiveness of a network associated with behaviors such as reactive aggression.
| S-EPMC2092389 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionExposure to disaster-related media may be a risk factor for mental distress, but this has not been examined in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study assesses whether exposure to social and traditional media during the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with mental distress among U.S. adults.MethodsData came from the Understanding America Study, conducted with a cross-sectional, nationally representative sample of adults who completed surveys online. Participants included 6,329 adults surveyed between March 10 and March 31, 2020. Regression analyses examined the associations of (1) self-reported average time spent on social media in a day (hours) and (2) number of traditional media sources (radio, TV, and newspaper) consulted to learn about COVID-19 with self-reported mental distress (4-item Patient Health Questionnaire). Data were analyzed in April 2020.ResultsParticipants responding at later survey dates reported more time spent on social media (β=0.02, 95% CI=0.01, 0.03), a greater number of traditional media sources consulted to learn about COVID-19 (β=0.01, 95% CI=0.01, 0.02), and greater mental distress (β=0.07, 95% CI=0.04, 0.09). Increased time spent on social media and consulting a greater number of traditional media sources to learn about COVID-19 were independently associated with increased mental distress, even after adjusting for potential confounders (social media: β=0.14, 95% CI=0.05, 0.23; traditional media: β=0.14, 95% CI=0.08, 0.20).ConclusionsExposure to a greater number of traditional media sources and more hours on social media was modestly associated with mental distress during the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.
| S-EPMC7351429 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We conducted a four-wave prospective study of Palestinian adults living in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, interviewed between 2007 and 2009 at 6-month interval to explore transactional relationships between resource loss (i.e., intra and interpersonal resource loss) and psychological distress (i.e., posttraumatic stress disorder and depression symptoms). Initially, 1196 Palestinians completed the first wave interview and 752 of these participants completed all four interviews. A cross-lagged panel design was constructed to model the effects of trauma exposure on both resource loss and psychological distress and the subsequent reciprocal effects of resource loss and psychological distress across four time waves. Specifically, resource loss was modeled to predict distress, which in turn was expected to predict further resource loss. Structural equation modeling was used to test this design. We found that psychological distress significantly predicts resource loss across shorter, 6-month time waves, but that resource loss predicts distress across longer, 12-month intervals. These findings support the Conservation of Resources theory's corollary of loss spirals.
| S-EPMC3303982 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Prior research examining links between neighborhood violence and mental health has not been able to establish whether it is perceived levels of neighborhood violence, or actual levels of violent crime, that matter most for adolescents' psychological well-being. In this study, we ascertained both perceived neighborhood safety and objectively-measured neighborhood-level violent crime (using a novel geospatial index of police-reported crime incidents) for 4464 adolescent respondents from the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS 2011-2014). We used propensity score-matched regression models to examine associations between these measures and CHIS adolescents' symptoms of psychological distress. We found that adolescents who perceived their neighborhood to be unsafe were two times more likely than those who perceived their neighborhood to be safe to report serious psychological distress (OR?=?2.4, 95 % CI?=?1.20, 4.96). Adolescents who lived in areas objectively characterized by high levels of violent crime, however, were no more likely than their peers in safer areas to be distressed (OR?=?1.41; 95 % CI?=?0.60, 3.32). Our results suggest that, at the population level, adolescents' perceptions of neighborhood violence, rather than objective levels of neighborhood crime, are most salient for their mental health.
| S-EPMC5052152 | biostudies-literature