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.

Keywords:

• Threat perception
• Threat accessibility
• Framing
• Terrorism
• Signal detection theory

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr David DeSteno for his thoughtful feedback on an early version of this manuscript and Dr Rhea Eskew for his essential contributions to stimulus development for the modified Shooter Bias Task utilised herein.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health [grant numbers R01MH093394, DP1OD003312] and the US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (contract numbers W5J9CQ-12-C-0028, W5J9CQ-12-C-0049). The views, opinions and/or findings contained in this paper are those of the authors and shall not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy or decision, unless so designated by other documents.