title: 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., favouring 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.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Northeastern University , Boston , MA , USA.
authors.forename: Jolie Baumann
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Wormwood
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Northeastern University , Boston , MA , USA.
authors.forename: Spencer K
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Lynn
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Northeastern University , Boston , MA , USA.|b Department of Psychiatry and the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging , Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School , Boston , MA , USA.
authors.forename: Lisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Feldman Barrett
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Northeastern University , Boston , MA , USA.|c Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial VA Hospital , Bedford , MA , USA.
authors.forename: Karen S
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Quigley
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005239:Fear / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D005389:Firearms; D005717:Games, Experimental; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D023481:Terrorism / Q000523:psychology*
keywords: Framing; Signal detection theory; Terrorism; Threat accessibility; Threat perception