The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Students' Perceptions of War Imagery

Abstract

I n its entire history, the human race has dealt with war and its after effects; the ever-present threat or fear of war has hung over our history, the twentieth-century perhaps more so than other eras, like a shadow (Duiker & Spielvogel, 2004). Media coverage of war has become more and more graphic as time has progressed; whereas photographs from the Second World War remained sequestered for years afterwards, photographs and video feed from the Vietnam conflict arrived in the U.S. with a 24-hour delay (Duiker & Spielvogel, 2004). The Gulf War of the early 90s was televised almost simultaneously, with the more recent conflict in Iraq being aired in a similar fashion. The coverage of combat situations is perhaps even harder to avoid now that there are more 24-hour news networks all airing footage simultaneously in addition to the presence of the internet and its varied news outlets. As the technology of war has advanced, so has the technology to observe war. With these advancements in mind, it becomes important to understand how people will react to this barrage of imagery; the caveat here being that psychological research on war, and its effects, only seems to occur during and in years following the actual armed conflicts. In the years following World War II the focus of psychological research centered on the effects of war on soldiers (e.g., Ferguson, 1942; Stagner & Osgood, 1946; and Buss & Durkee, 1957). Perhaps due to the conflicting national opinions of the conflict, the Vietnam War brought an increased interest in research on attitudes and perception of civilians (e.g.

Personality and the perception of situation structure in a military environment: seeking sensation versus structure as a soldier

“…Individual differences are the source of behavioral variation in times of stress, and these differences are neither fully reduced nor reducible through drill and expertise (Hancock & Szalma, 2008). The perception of oneself and situations differs largely, because of individual and personality differences (Arpan & Peterson, 2008;Dorros, Hanzal, & Segrin, 2008;Frühholz, Prinz, & Herrmann, 2010;Guidry & Hammer, 2008;Rosenkrantz & Morrison, 1992). "Stress is often in the mind of stressed" and therefore, it is important to include both situational and personality variables in understanding the soldiers' response to potential stressors (Krueger, 2008).…”