Karen S. Quigley - US grants

An expanding literature detailing the effects of major life events, and daily stressors on behavior, cognition and physiology attests to the importance of stressors in our everyday environment. Psychologists have focussed considerable attention on group differences in stress responses, but much less on individual differences in responsivity. However, both the physical nature of a stressor, as well as an individual's construal of psychologically-relevant events play an important role in determining the individual's response. This proposal describes a new methodology for assessing individual differences in the construal of psychological stressors and the effect of those stressors on physiology. These studies will examine individually determined stimulus-response functions relating the construal of stimuli differing in intensity to changes in cardiovascular reactivity. The proposed studies will examine the shape and parameters describing the stimulus-response functions for each individual. This strategy will be applied to the specific problem of assessing individual differences in the cardiovascular component of the stress response because individual variation in cardiovascular reactivity has been hypothesized to relate to both psychological and physical health. For example, both panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder are associated with altered cardiovascular function. The role of individual differences in these and other anxiety disorders is receiving renewed interest because recently developed methods are beginning to provide a better understanding of the autonomic nervous system mechanisms underlying altered cardiovascular reactivity. Individuals with exaggerated cardiovascular reactivity have also been hypothesized to have an increased risk of hypertension or coronary artery disease, although the support for this hypothesis is mixed. Both of these types of studies require good methodological approaches for understanding individual differences in psychological and physical health. Thus, the proposed studies will examine physiological and affective responses to common laboratory-based psychological stimuli, the cold forehead and cold hand pressor tests, across a range of stimulus intensities. The cardiovascular responses will be plotted as functions of the construals of stimulus intensity, and the resulting functions will provide parameters for each individual. The results will permit an assessment of the usefulness of the proposed approach, the reliability of the individual parameters, and determine the relationship between an individual's construal of a psychologically- relevant event and his or her cardiovascular reactivity to that event.

Experiencing mass violence, terrorism, or other traumatic events can shape how individuals perceive and respond to their social world. Anecdotally, following extensive media coverage of mass violence events, many report perceiving objects, people, and situations as particularly threatening; and, as media coverage shifts to emphasize resilience and community cohesion, this hypervigilance for threats seems to dissipate. Karen Quigley (Northeastern University), Yu-Ru Lin (University of Pittsburgh) and their collaborators will empirically test how emotionally potent media coverage of a real-world threat alters threat perception (i.e., the perception of a potentially harmful event, situation or stimulus as present or imminent). Specifically, they will test the hypothesis that media coverage focusing on death and destruction caused by a serious real-world threat event will have a more detrimental impact on subsequent threat perception than media coverage of the same event that focuses on people's heroic responses to the threat. This work could reveal potential harmful real-world consequences of emotionally potent media reporting of a terrorism event as well as suggest methods for alleviating such effects (e.g., by reporting on positive responses to such tragedies, like the heroics of first responders). This work will also help characterize the types of individuals who are at greatest risk of altered threat perception after a mass violence or terrorism event or when media attention to such events increases.

This project will examine the effects of real-world mass violence on threat perception among members of an affected community using multiple threat perception paradigms in the laboratory. A longitudinal study will be used to assess changes in threat perception before, during and after renewed media coverage near an upcoming anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, a potent real-world mass violence event that killed three and injured more than 250. The investigators will utilize novel media tracking measures to assess changes in exposure to media coverage of the bombings and threat-related events at both the community-wide and individual level. Specifically, the research will examine changes in threat perception as a result of (1) naturally-occurring changes in participants' exposure to actual media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings near an upcoming anniversary of the tragedy and (2) in-lab exposure to media-style vignettes about the bombings that are designed to specifically activate negative or positive concepts related to the tragedy. A second, cross-sectional study will examine responses to physical threats (i.e., guns) and social threats (i.e., scowling faces) shown outside of conscious awareness. This will test whether exposure and affective framing can influence the conscious detectability of physical and social threats. Taken together, this research will provide a better understanding of how real-world mass violence and the media response to it can influence basic perceptual mechanisms that underlie changes in every day judgments and behaviors among members of the affected communities.

On April 15, 2013, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing 3 and injuring more than 250. This tragedy was stressful for many of those living in the Boston metropolitan area, even those not attending the Boston Marathon. Social psychological research can help us understand how experiencing this type of event can affect us; for example, do these experiences influence how we perceive and respond to our social environment? Do we see the world as more threatening after experiencing this type of event? Previous research conducted by the PI and colleagues demonstrate that in the weeks after the Boston Marathon bombing, people had an altered tendency to see threats in ambiguous situations. The current research will use the context of the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing to further examine this question; specifically, the PIs will longitudinally examine how media coverage surrounding the anniversary can change how people with low and high exposure to the initial event perceive potential threats. Participants will include people living or working in Boston at the time of the original event (high exposure group) and people not living in the area at the time of the original event (low exposure group). The study will be conducted at 3 waves: 2 months before the anniversary (Wave 1), within 1 month of the anniversary (Wave 2), and 2 months after (Wave 3) the anniversary. At each wave, participants' exposure to media coverage of the bombing will be assessed, and they will complete a threat perception task. In this task, participants view a person holding an object against a background scene for short intervals. Participants must quickly decide whether the person they see is threatening (e.g., holding a gun) or non-threatening (e.g., holding a soda can or wallet). The researchers hypothesize that those with more initial event exposure and those with more exposure to media coverage of the anniversary of the bombing will show a tendency to misidentify non-threats as threats, and decreased sensitivity to distinguishing threats from non-threats.


This study will be the first to examine the effect of news coverage of real-world mass violence on changes in threat perception over time. This research will have real-world applied impacts by showing how threat perception changes before and after a terrorism event anniversary with heightened media coverage. Alterations in seeing threats, such as "seeing" a person holding a gun when they are holding a wallet, can have serious real-world implications for those working in jobs that require threat perception every day (e.g., police officers or military personnel). This work also could reveal potential detrimental real-world consequences of highly evocative media reporting of the anniversary of a terrorism event, particularly for vulnerable individuals (such as those with higher event exposure). The individual differences approach used here also will help us to identify those at highest risk for altered threat perception in the context of media attention to a prior terrorism event.