Threat perception after the Boston Marathon bombings: The effects of personal relevance and conceptual framing

Abstract

We examined how the Boston Marathon bombings affected threat perception in the Boston community. In a threat perception task, participants attempted to “shoot” armed targets and avoid shooting unarmed targets. Participants viewing images of the bombings accompanied by affectively negative music and text (e.g., “Terror Strikes Boston”) made more false alarms (i.e., more errors “shooting” unarmed targets) compared to participants viewing the same images accompanied by affectively positive music and text (e.g., “Boston Strong”) and participants who did not view bombing images. This difference appears to be driven by decreased sensitivity (i.e., decreased ability to distinguish guns from non-guns) as opposed to a more liberal bias (i.e., favoring the “shoot” response). Additionally, the more strongly affected the participant was by the bombings, the more their sensitivity was reduced in the negatively-framed condition, suggesting that this framing was particularly detrimental to the most vulnerable individuals in the affected community.

Understanding emotion in context: how the Boston marathon bombings altered the impact of anger on threat perception

“…It is also possible that participants at Time 1 experienced greater direct exposure to the bombings than participants at the latter two time points and that exposure interacted with the anger induction to influence threat perception. Consistent with this reasoning, a recent study using Boston community members revealed that how affected participants reported feeling by the bombings during the week they occurred interacted with a negative threat‐eliciting induction to produce poorer threat sensitivity on a threat perception task similar to that reported here (Wormwood et al, ). Conversely, it is possible that individuals who were more impacted by the bombings or who had more direct exposure to the bombings were less likely to participate at Time 1 because the study involved threat perception and was located in downtown Boston less than a mile from the Boston Marathon bombings.…”

“…In the present studies, participants were asked to make simple object recognition decisions on each trial by indicating whether or not each target individual was holding a gun. However, many previous studies have utilized similar tasks but instead asked participants to make a “shoot” vs. “non‐shoot” decision instead of an object recognition decision (e.g., Correll et al, ; Unkelbach et al, ; Wormwood et al, ). It seems likely that the experience of anger would differentially impact these two kinds of behaviors (i.e., detection vs. the aggressive action of shooting).…”

“…The task was a modified version of the Shooter Bias Task developed by Correll, Park, Judd, and Wittenbrink (); all stimuli were obtained from Joshua Correll and are described in detail in Correll et al (). Visual noise was added to these original images to increase the difficulty of the task (sample stimuli are depicted in Figure S1 in the Supporting information; see also Wormwood et al, ). Original images from the Shooter Bias Task were reduced to a contrast range of 35%–65% of the maximum luminance available, and then the RGB values at each pixel were altered by adding a multivariate normally distributed random RGB triplet ( M = 0, SD = 17.5%, truncated at ±2 SD s).…”

“…Not surprisingly, the vast majority of research investigating the impact of such events has relied on large public databases and naturalistic, observational designs (e.g., Bonanno, Galea, Bucciarelli, & Vlahov, ; Gigerenzer, ; Su, Tran, Wirtz, Langteau, & Rothman, ) which are unable to address psychological mechanisms at the level of the individual. More importantly, the vast majority of experiments and studies on the effects of incidents of mass violence have taken place several months after the initial incident (e.g., Bonanno et al, ; Fischhoff, Gonzalez, Small, & Lerner, ; Galea et al, ; Luft et al, ; Wormwood, Lynn, Barrett, & Quigley, ; although see Garfin, Holman, & Silver, ; Silver, Holman, McIntosh, Poulin, & Gil‐Rivas, ). This is problematic given that we currently do not know how long such incidents acutely impact emotions, judgments and behaviors, particularly among the average community member without overt psychopathology.…”

Is it dangerous? The role of an emotional visual search strategy and threat‐relevant training in the detection of guns and knives

“…Also of interest to threat detection performance, but somewhat distinct from threat-based visual search tasks is the shooter bias paradigm (Baumann & DeSteno, 2010). Here, participants view several different urban and suburban scenes (e.g., park, train station) and have to decide whether a target individual is holding a gun or a neutral object (e.g., camera, wallet) by means of a key press (Baumann & DeSteno, 2010) or by pulling the trigger (or refraining from doing so on neutral object trials) on a realistic, wireless gun controller (e.g., Wormwood, Lynn, Feldman Barrett, & Quigley, 2016). Participants who were instructed to write about an angry memory prior to participating in the shooter bias paradigm were more likely to misidentify a neutral object as a gun than vice versa (Baumann & DeSteno, 2010), whilst participants who were asked to write about their daily routine or about a happy or other negative event (e.g., sadness or disgust) did not demonstrate a significant difference in the types of misidentification errors made.…”