After a violent disaster, it might be healthier to turn off the news.
A recent study found people who watched, read, or listened to six or more hours of coverage following the Boston bombing daily experienced more stress-related symptoms than the people who had actually been there, a University of California-Irvine news release reported. The symptoms increased with each additional hour of coverage experienced.
"We were very surprised at the degree to which repeated media exposure was so strongly associated with acute stress symptoms," E. Alison Holman, associate professor of nursing science at UC Irvine and the study's lead author, said. "We suspect that there's something about repeated exposure to violent images or sounds that keeps traumatic events alive and can prolong the stress response in vulnerable people. There is mounting evidence that live and video images of traumatic events can trigger flashbacks and encourage fear conditioning. If repeatedly viewing traumatic images reactivates fear or threat responses in the brain and promotes rumination, there could be serious health consequences."
The finding challenges the idea that people must be directly exposed to an event in order to suffer associated stress or trauma.
The team looked at 4,675 adults between two and four weeks after the Boston attacks had occurred. They found those who were exposed to six or more hours a day of bombing-related material were nine times as likely to suffer "high acute stress" than those who only experienced one hour or less of coverage daily.
Symptoms of stress include: "intrusive thoughts, feeling on edge or hypervigilant, avoiding reminders of the event and feeling detached from it," the news release reported.
"In our prior work, we found that early and repeated exposure to violent images from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the Iraq War may have led to an increase in physical and psychological ailments up to three years [later]," Roxane Cohen Silver, professor of psychology & social behavior, medicine and public health at UC Irvine and the study's co-author, said in the news release. "Our new findings contribute to the growing body of research suggesting that there is no psychological benefit to repeated exposure to graphic images of horror."
The study authors stressed they had no intention of turning the focus away from those who had experienced the event in real life, but rather wanted to point out that repeated exposure to disturbing images could be harmful.
"When you repeatedly see images of a person with gruesome injuries after an event is over, it's like the event continues and has its own presence in your life," Holman said. "Prolonged media exposure can turn what was an acute experience into a chronic form of stress. People may not realize how stressful these media-based exposures are. Looking at these images over and over again is not productive and may be harmful."
