Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bacasper]

Any posts on the conspiracy of 9/11 or whether it was one belong on the sticky thread. This is a separate issue.

Sept. 11 attacks did NOT elicit terror, but anger

Does �Terrorism� really trigger terror? New study suggests not.

Published on August 31, 2010

What was the emotional timeline of September 11, 2001? A fascinating study of this topic was released yesterday in Psychological Science, authored by Mitja Back, Albrecht Kupfer, and Boris Egloff of Johannes Gutenberg University. The authors analyzed 6.4 million words from messages sent on 85,000 different pagers on September 11. The messages are anonymous and apparently available publicly on the internet. They sorted the messages into 5-min blocks, according to the time they were sent, and analyzed 216 time blocks. They started with messages sent at 6:45 a.m. (2 hours before the first attack) and analyzed those through the 18 hours after the attack. Using software developed by Jamie Pennebaker and his colleagues, the authors counted the percentage of words in each block related to (a) sadness (crying, grief), (b) anxiety (worried, fearful), and (c) anger (hate, annoyed).

There�s something quite interesting about those results. You�d expect an act of �terror� to elicit mostly feelings of anxiety and fear, yet as the day wore on, and the news sunk in, the reaction was primarily anger, and although people�s anxiety didn�t increase, their anger did.

We don�t want to conclude that terror isn�t part of the reaction to acts of terrorism. The authors cite other research suggesting that the attacks on September 11th did certainly elicit lots of stress. But the anger reaction tells us another, and perhaps more important, part of the story. This finding is consistent with decades of research on conflict and aggression in the laboratory: When you attack someone, it reliably elicits a counterattack.

more, graph, and references at link

[Fox]

I'm not sure the contents of a person's text messages are the best way to explore how they're really feeling, especially using the methodology they used. After all, angry words can be a way to express anxiety.

[Leon]

[caniff]

[Summer Wine]

[Ya-ta Boy]