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Explanation:
The September 11th attacks were the deadliest international terrorist attacks to have occurred on US soil, and have had profound effects on American public opinion. Ever since that day, researchers from various fields have been investigating the ways in which these highly traumatic events have affected the American public. As we are interested in chronicling the multitude of public responses to these attacks, we draw not only from the field of political science, but also from other fields such as sociology, economics, psychology, and medicine. Although this is a vast literature, we have identified seven broad categories that capture how the American people reacted in the aftermath of the attacks, and given reminders of the attacks. The seven fields are as follows: (1) risk perceptions, emotions, and disorders; (2) attitudes toward outgroups and the policies which affect them; (3) trust and patriotism; (4) ideology; (5) policy preferences; (6) evaluations of leaders and voting behavior: and (7) media coverage. We also note that all of the studies in this review deal specifically with 9/11 or reminders of 9/11 in the US context. There is a much richer literature that explores the effects of terrorist attacks more generally both within and outside of the United States.
Risk Perceptions, Emotional Reactions, and Disorders Following 9/11
Perhaps one of the most studied outcomes of the September 11th terrorist attacks are the widespread psychological effects which were witnessed among the American public. Some of the earliest research published in Silver, et al. 2002 pertained to the various stress and depressive disorders witnessed in the population after the attacks. Later investigations such as Bonanno, et al. 2007 and Chu, et al. 2006 delve in to which groups of people were most resilient or best able to cope with the trauma. The more recent work in this area, such as North, et al. 2015, has been looking at the long-term effects on highly exposed individuals from New York City. Another area studied is risk perceptions, or how threatened the public felt as a result of the attacks. The research in Fischhoff, et al. 2003; Huddy, et al. 2005; and Lerner, et al. 2003 seems to converge on the idea that the attacks elevated personal risk perceptions linked to terrorism, although there is not a definitive consensus as to how quickly these effects diminished. Another strand of scholarship examines emotional reactions to the attacks felt by a broad cross-section of the public. These works primarily focus on negative affect experienced by the American people and how these felt emotions are related yet often quite distinct. The most common negative emotions studied are anger, fear, anxiety, and sadness and these are often linked with other political outcomes as seen in the works of Huddy, et al. 2007; Huddy, et al. 2005; and Merolla and Zechmeister 2009. Emotional reactions to the terrorist attacks have even been studied at the physiological level in Ganzel, et al. 2007, which imaged the amygdala region of the brain (which is responsible for how emotions are experienced).
