News Coverage of Disasters Boosts Stress
The more people see of traumatic events, the higher their anxiety

(HealthDay News) -- You don't have to live through a grisly event to experience stress. Simply watching televised reports of it is enough to boost anxiety levels.

That's one of the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States .

Using dream content as a marker of daily stress, researchers have found that those events did, indeed, increase people's stress levels. Each additional hour of daily TV viewing related to the 9/11 events raised a person's stress level by 6 percent.

"We interpreted dreaming about specific references to 9/11 as indicative of stress," lead author Ruth Propper, an associate professor of psychology at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., told HealthDay .

Propper's study, published in the journal Psychological Science , involved 14 Boston-area undergraduate students who kept dream journals from the end of August 2001 through Dec. 3 of that year. Compared with dreams occurring in the weeks before 9/11, the dreams that followed "were twice as likely to contain specific references to 9/11, to be threatening or to contain themes related to 9/11," she said.

Researchers in Hong Kong observed a similar pattern after the tsunami that occurred in December 2004. More intensive media coverage of the event was associated with higher levels of stress, according to a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health .

The impact of such events on children can be more troubling, researchers contend. Television coverage of global conflicts has escalated in recent years, exposing millions of American families to horrific images of terrorism and war, reports the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Even local news, with reports of kidnappings, shootings, murders and sexual assaults, can be frightening to children, it says.

The massacre of students and faculty at Virginia Tech last year is a recent example.

"Should we be allowing children to watch TV in the aftermath of this rampage in Virginia ? Clearly, one of the lessons that we learned from September 11 is 'no' -- that parents should screen their kids, as well as themselves, if they know themselves to be especially vulnerable -- from watching this," Alan Hilfer, chief psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City, told HealthDay .

To help children cope with traumatic news events, the Kaiser Foundation suggests that parents:

• Limit children's exposure to graphic news images, especially replays of traumatic events. Consider not allowing young children to watch news and monitoring older children's exposure to news.
• When kids watch news, watch with them and talk about what they see and how it makes them feel.
• Reassure children of their safety and let them know that everything possible is being done to protect them.
• Maintain daily routines and rituals to provide a sense of security.

On the Web

To learn more about coping with traumatic events, visit the National Institute of Mental Health.

SOURCES: HealthDay News ; Ruth Propper, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology, Merrimack College, North Andover, Mass.; Alan Hilfer, Ph.D., chief psychologist, Maimonides Medical Center, New York City; April 2007, Psychological Science ; August 2006, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health ; Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, spring 2003, Key Facts. Children and the News: Coping With Terrorism, War and Everyday Violence
Author: Karen Pallarito
Publication Date: April 30, 2008
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