title: Sadness shifts to anxiety over time and distance from the national tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut.
abstract: How do increasing temporal and spatial distance affect the emotions people feel and express in response to tragic events? Standard views suggest that emotional intensity should decrease but are silent on changes in emotional quality. Using a large Twitter data set, we identified temporal and spatial patterns in use of emotional and cognitive words in tweets about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Although use of sadness words decreased with time and spatial distance, use of anxiety words showed the opposite pattern and was associated with concurrent increases in language reflecting causal thinking. In a follow-up experiment, we found that thinking about abstract causes (as opposed to concrete details) of this event similarly evoked decreased sadness but increased anxiety, which was associated with perceptions that a similar event might occur in the future. These data challenge current theories of emotional reactivity and identify time, space, and abstract causal thinking as factors that elicit categorical shifts in emotional responses to tragedy.
authors.affiliation: Columbia University bpd2108@columbia.edu ochsner@psych.columbia.edu.
authors.forename: Bruce
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Doré
authors.affiliation: Columbia University.
authors.forename: Leonard
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ort
authors.affiliation: Columbia University.
authors.forename: Ofir
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Braverman
authors.affiliation: Columbia University.
authors.forename: Kevin N
authors.initials: KN
authors.lastname: Ochsner
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001007:Anxiety / Q000209:etiology* / Q000523:psychology; D003237:Connecticut; D016208:Databases, Factual; D005260:Female; D005389:Firearms; D006117:Grief; D006708:Homicide / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D054527:Mass Casualty Incidents / Q000523:psychology*; D061108:Social Media / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000523:psychology*; D014754:Violence / Q000523:psychology
keywords: cognitive appraisal; emotions