Is Television Traumatic?

Dream journals being kept by students in a college psychology class have provided researchers with a unique look at how people experienced the events of 9/11, including the influence that television coverage of the World Trade Center attacks had on people's levels of stress.

Reported in the April 2007 issue of the journal Psychological Science, the study data finds that for every hour of television viewed on Sept. 11 – with some students reporting in excess of 13 hours watched – levels of stress, as indicated by dream content, increased significantly. In addition, the study found that time spent talking with family and friends helped individuals to better process the day's horrific events.

"We had not set out to conduct a scientific study of TV viewing and trauma," says lead author Ruth Propper, an associate professor of psychology at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass. "But it so happened that students enrolled in one of my courses during the fall 2001 semester were already in the process of keeping dream journals on a nightly basis. As the events of 9/11 were unfolding, I realized there was a valuable opportunity to find out what impact both media coverage and social interactions were having on individuals throughout the course of this tragedy."

So, on Sept. 12, Propper distributed a questionnaire to her students asking them to report on their activities of the day before, including the amount of TV they had watched, the amount of radio they had listened to, and the amount of time they had spent talking about the experience with family and friends.

"What distinguishes these findings is that they occurred in 'real-time,'" adds coauthor Robert Stickgold, a sleep researcher in the Division of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "Because we have the students' pre-9/11 dreams with which to compare, we can draw more reliable conclusions about our post-9/11 findings."

Dreams are a reflection of the way the mind is processing and sorting the day's events, and depending on a person's state of mind, will contain different images. For the purposes of this study, the authors separated dream content into four categories: dreams containing specific references to 9/11 (smoke, explosions, police, box cutters, etc.); dreams with generalized threatening content (which made people fearful even though they didn't contain specific references to 9/11); dreams containing broadly related themes related to 9/11 (for example, disasters in general, rather than the 9/11 disaster specifically); and, dreams with strong negative emotional content (which elicited general feelings of anger, fear, or sadness).

"People's dreams can function as a measure of how much distress they are feeling and how well or poorly they are coping," says Stickgold. "If, in your dreams, you are still seeing specific traumatic images – buildings collapsing, fire burning, people jumping – then it means that these stressful events are not being adequately processed. But, if you're seeing tangential events in your dreams – for example, a hurricane rather than the specific 9/11 images – it indicates that your brain is trying to make sense of the trauma and that you are coping successfully."

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that in the days and weeks following the attacks the students' dreams were twice as likely to contain at least one of the four "content features" as they had prior to 9/11. But, says Propper, "Our next question was, 'Is there an explanation for why some individuals' dreams contained specific images of 9/11 and others didn't?'"
So, the authors turned to the questionnaires.

The questionnaire responses showed that throughout the day of Sept. 11, students spent between 0 and 2.5 hours listening to the radio. They spent between one and 12 hours – an average of 5.9 hours – talking about the events with family and friends. And they spent between 1.5 and 13 hours watching television news coverage of the attacks, an average of 6.5 hours.

"When we compared these responses with the dream journal entries, we discovered that for each hour of TV viewing a subject reported, there was a statistically significant six percent increase in the proportion of the dreams containing a specific reference to the attacks," says Propper. Among the individuals who watched less than three hours of television there were no specific references at all.

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In Case of Terrorist Attack At The Mall

A RAND Corporation report identifies and prioritizes 39 security measures that can substantially reduce the risk of terrorist attacks at enclosed shopping centers.

The study ranks the security measures based on the relative risks of a set of attack scenarios and on the cost and effectiveness of each measure. It identifies a high-priority set of six to 10 security measures that can cut terrorism risk to just one-fifteenth the level it would otherwise be, based on case studies of three enclosed shopping centers in the United States.

The highest priority measures identified by the RAND study span a range of approaches and include: public information campaigns encouraging people to report suspicious packages; placing vehicle barriers at pedestrian entrances to block suicide car bombers; searching kiosks for bombs and weapons; more clearly labeling exits so shoppers can quickly find their way out of malls in an emergency; and searching all bags and requiring everyone entering shopping centers to remove their coats to check for explosives and weapons.

Costs of implementing the highest priority security measures range from $500,000 to $2 million per year per at each of the three shopping centers examined. In addition, researchers found that implementing the high-priority measures would be 95 percent as effective as implementing all 39 measures.

“The RAND analysis does not assess the probability of terrorist attacks at shopping centers and does not suggest that the risk is high or increasing,” says Tom LaTourrette, lead researcher on the project.

Millions of people shop safely at shopping centers every day, but the threat of terrorist attacks at the centers has become a more prominent concern since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. There have been more than 60 terrorist attacks against shopping centers in 21 countries since 1998.

The report by RAND, a nonprofit research organization, uses a quantitative modeling approach to rank security measures with the goal of achieving the greatest risk reduction for the least cost.

The ranking approach considers the relative likelihoods and consequences of different types of terrorist attacks at commercial shopping centers based on historical data, identifies site-specific physical security measures that could reduce these risks, and uses a model to prioritize the measures according to estimates of cumulative risk reduction and cumulative annual cost.

Despite examining centers that span a wide range in size and layout, the prioritization of security measures among the three centers studied by RAND is very similar, with eight of the top 10 measures being the same for all centers.

The report also finds that disaster preparedness plans and exercises that focus primarily on emergency response have limited effectiveness in reducing terrorism risk. The vast majority of terrorism risk derives from bomb attacks, which have immediate effects that abate quickly. This poses constraints on what can be done to reduce consequences once such an attack has occurred.

While shopping center operators could choose to implement some of the security measures identified in this report immediately, many of the measures may not be feasible or appropriate under current conditions. As a result, a tiered implementation may be the best strategy, implementing a set of security options most appropriate for today's environment and developing plans today for further measures if the environment changes for the worse, Rand says.

The report also notes that the impact of the security measures on shopping center business will depend on how shoppers and merchants perceive the terrorism threat. Some shoppers may dislike increased security and come to more secure centers less frequently, while others shoppers may prefer to go to centers with increased security because they will feel safer.

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Homeland Security Legislation Mandates Uniform K-9 Standards

Canine detection teams are a critical element in increased demand for explosive detection since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, leading to the introduction of new bipartisan legislation in Congress.

In response to this increased need, Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, ranking Republican and Rep. Chris Carney (D-Pa.), chairman, of the House Homeland Security Committee Subcommittee on Management, Investigations, and Oversight joined together with full committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and ranking Republican Peter King of New York to introduce H.R. 659, the "Canine Detection Improvement Act of2007."

This legislation addresses the need for improved and coordinated training, encourages the use of domestic dogs and confronts the need formore dogs by establishing a "Domestic Canine Breeding Grant Program" to increase canine numbers through both public and private means, the lawmakers say. Most importantly, the bill creates a canine team accreditation board to ensure proper certification standards and to prevent fraud and abuse, they add.

"Canine Detection Teams are critical to keeping America safe. This legislation is an important first step to ensuring that the supply of trained dogs will meet the nation's demand," says Thompson.

"This bipartisan, common sense legislation should help increase the use of domestically-bred dogs and support the work of canine breeding programs. Currently, the vast majority of these dogs are purchased in Europe, but by increasing domestic breeding we lower the costs of acquiring these dogs and ensure there are a sufficient number available for U.S. detection team training," Rogers adds.

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