Sadness shifts to anxiety with time and distance from national tragedy in Newtown CT

摘要

How do increasing temporal and spatial distance impact the emotions we feel and express in response to tragic events? Standard views suggest decreases in emotional intensity but are silent on changes in emotional quality. Using a large Twitter dataset, we identified temporal and spatial patterns in emotional and cognitive word use on the topic of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Although sadness words decreased with time and distance, anxiety words showed the opposite pattern, associated with concurrent increases in language reflecting causal thinking. In a follow-up experiment, we found that thinking about abstract causes (versus concrete details) of this event similarly evoked decreased sadness but increased anxiety, which was associated with perceptions that a similar event may 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.