BRIEF REPORTS Evaluation of Preparatory Measures for Coping With Anxiety Raised by Media Coverage of Terrorism Michelle Slone and Anat Shoshani Tel Aviv University This study examines effects of television broadcasts of terrorism on viewers’ anxiety and raises suggestions for 2 intervention strategies to moderate elevated anxiety. Participants were 120 young Israeli adults randomly allocated to a terrorism or a nonterrorism television broadcast and assigned to 1 of 3 intervention conditions prior to exposure— cognitive based, emotional based, or none. Anxiety was measured explicitly and projectively prior and subsequent to manipulation. Results showed greater posttest anxiety in terrorism versus nonterrorism groups. In the terrorism group, therapeutic interventions led to lower posttest levels of explicit and projective anxiety than the control intervention, with advantage to the cognitive intervention on projective anxiety. In the nonterrorism group, the emotional intervention produced greater posttest anxiety on the explicit anxiety measure. Findings indicate noxious effects of television coverage of terrorism and suggest preparatory measures that maximize public coping. Keywords: terrorism, media, primary intervention, anxiety Developments in media technology combined with characteris- tics of modern war have pitched television coverage of violent conflict and terrorism into personal homes. However, despite these rapid developments, research on the effects on viewers of media exposure to terrorism has been relatively sparse. The present study examines the influence of exposure to media coverage of terrorism and the effects of interventions that prepare viewers for this exposure. This is a laboratory study in which participants were exposed to extracts of news coverage of either terrorist attacks or nonterrorist political material and, for each type of exposure, to one of three group-format primary intervention conditions—a cog- nitive intervention, an emotional-based clinical session, or no intervention. In a repeated measures design, state anxiety modifi- cations prior and subsequent to participation in the interventions and exposure were assessed. The past few decades have produced changes in the nature of conflict, represented as a shift from distant, nation-to-nation wars to a predominance of low-intensive conflicts. These are defined as violent confrontations between nations and nonnation factions that disrupt peaceful existence but cannot be classified as full-scale war (Golan & Shai, 2004). One of the major categories of this type of conflict is terrorism that is aimed at shattering extant social, economic, and community structures, leaving society fragmented. Parallel to changes in definitions of war, progress in media technology has created a channel for rapid dispersal of scenes of war, terror, and violence as they occur in real time into almost every living room. Both geographical distance between the front line and the civilian population and physical distance between actual events and their distribution to the civilian population have become all but eliminated. This has produced widespread exposure to violence that penetrates overtly and covertly into viewers’ life (Johnson, 1996). In this way, viewers who are not directly exposed to war and terrorism may become witness to personal pain and abhorrent scenes of carnage and destruction. Almost since the inception of television, research has investi- gated relations between media exposure to violence and markers of psychological functioning. Factors found to correlate with media displays of violence include life view changes (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1994), desensitization and elevated use of violence (Linz, Donnerstein, & Adams, 1989), and risk-taking behavior, such as substance abuse, promiscuity, and theft (Klein, 1993). However, few studies have focused on emotional effects of exposure to media-portrayed violence, and these have produced equivocal results. One set of claims indicates increased anxiety as a result of media exposure to political violence (Slone, 2000) and also gives evidence for posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, such as nightmares, anxiety, and fears (Joshi & Kaschak, 1998). The viewing public has been found to respond strongly to media- portrayed political violence with pity, fury, or a range of other sentiments (Sontag, 2005). Studies of the influence of coverage of September 11, 2001, revealed a direct relation between, on the one hand, extended media exposure and, one the other, posttraumatic symptoms and intensive negative emotions related to acute distress and feelings of vulnerability and insecurity (Cho et al., 2003; Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2001). The alternative claim argues that news broadcasts, however violent, palliate anxiety evoked by actual events. This claim is extrapolated from high viewing ratings of event broadcasts during Michelle Slone and Anat Shoshani, Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. Training materials describing the interventions can be obtained on request. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michelle Slone, Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. E-mail: mich@post.tau.ac.il Journal of Counseling Psychology Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association 2006, Vol. 53, No. 4, 535–542 0022-0167/06/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-0167.53.4.535 535 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.