Post-Traumatic Growth Following Exposure to Memorial Reports of the 5.12 Wenchuan Earthquake: The Moderating Roles of Self-Esteem and Long-Term PTSD Symptoms

Abstract

Media exposure during a traumatic event has been found to be associated with negative psychological consequences. However, the post-disaster role of the mass media and the possible positive psychological consequences of media exposure has received less attention. In the present study, we hypothesized that exposure to memorial media reports would lead to improved post-traumatic growth (PTG). Further, we evaluated the moderating role of self-esteem and long-term post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in the relationship between media exposure and PTG. Using a cross-sectional design, we surveyed individuals (N = 1000, mean age = 45.62, 43.5% male) who were recruited from disaster-affected communities ten years after the 5.12 Wenchuan earthquake which was the largest country-level trauma in the past three decades. Results revealed that individuals with lower self-esteem or lower PTSD symptoms would have higher psychological growth with greater exposure to memorial news reports. For individuals who reported having both high levels of self-esteem and PTSD symptoms, the relationship between media exposure and PTG was negative. These findings help present trauma in a new light, particularly regarding the rapid and instantaneous new coverage of the digital age. This study also has multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and clinical implications for the fields of psychology, public health, and communications.

Analysis of Online News Coverage on Earthquakes Through Text Mining

“…The distribution of the reported seismicity is from earthquakes that occur on or very close to land with most of the earthquakes that happen along mid-ocean ridges not reported. This follows the trend observed in Le Texier et al (2016). Figure 3 shows the timeline of detected reports binned in weeks.…”

“…In general, the expected trend of an increased number of published articles for the larger magnitude earthquakes holds (e.g., Le Texier et al, 2016) keeping in mind that there are far less earthquakes of higher magnitude. In Figure 4A we divide the number of articles with the number of global earthquakes of 2018 in the respective magnitude category, clearly showing a higher ratio of published articles for the larger magnitude earthquakes.…”

“…where M t is the minimum earthquake magnitude threshold reported ( Figure 4B). Unlike Le Texier et al (2016), who developed a model to explain the number of mentions each earthquake of magnitude greater than 5 gets by its geophysical characteristics (earthquake magnitude, depth, localization and concentration), our model takes into consideration the earthquake magnitude of any size as well as the number of news agencies available. Thus, for typical minimum reported earthquake magnitude M t of 4 and 23 news agencies one would expect about 23 articles for earthquakes of this magnitude.…”

“…One challenging problem arises from the use of part of speech taggers, including incorrect tagging of words, vague classification of entities (Asghar et al, 2014;Jurafsky and Martin, 2014), language-related issues (Pinto et al, 2016), extraction of temporal expressions (Mani and Wilson, 2000;Kisilevich et al, 2010;Bögel et al, 2014;Derczynski and Gaizauskas, 2015) and geographical locations (Kisilevich et al, 2010;Piskorski and Atkinson, 2011) as discussed by Gupta (2016). Another case is with interpreting the content written by different journalists especially when using technical terms (Liu, 2010), the translation of words denoting numerical values into numbers (Miner et al, 2012), and the mapping of articles referring to earthquakes with the characteristics provided by USGS (Le Texier et al, 2016). Another limitation the current prototype has is the 5,000 character limit imposed by Google translator library (GoogleTrans) on identifying the language of the news article and translating it.…”

“…Many researchers have tried to identify the factors that determine the level of coverage news agencies give following major earthquake events (Suzanne, 2006;Eisensee and Strömberg, 2007;Stomberg, 2012;Le Texier et al, 2016). These studies do not specify that data was automatically gathered, clustered and processed for information extraction in real time and, moreover, these studies have been limited to specific earthquakes or focused on a particular geographical region.…”