While I agree that world events have always happened, and the media is bringing it to our attention more so is therefore instilling fear....at the same time you have a desensitizing effect. Sorry for the copy and paste. I have just taken a small part.
Desensitization and Media Effects
Desensitization is a psychological process that has often been involved in explaining viewers' emotional reactions to media violence. Research onemotional reactions to violent messages has been concerned with the possibility that continued exposure to violence in the mass media will result in desensitization, that is, that exposure to media violence will undermine feelings of concern, empathy, or sympathy that viewers might have toward victims of actual violence.
To understand the effects of repeated exposure to violence, researchers have suggested that viewers become comfortable with violence that is initially anxiety provoking, much as they would if they were undergoing exposure therapy. According to Gordon Paul and D. A. Bernstein (1973), exposure therapy is widely regarded as the most effective clinical therapy for training individuals to engage in behaviors that were previously inhibited by anxiety responses. Originally, researchers emphasized a therapeutic counterconditioning technique known as "systematic desensitization," in which the patient was gradually and systematically exposed to a graded series of anxiety provoking objects or situations. Many researchers, including Edna B. Foa and Michael J. Kozak (1986), have demonstrated that simply exposing a patient to frightening stimuli , regardless of whether it is presented in graduated form, will significantly diminish the anxiety or negative affect that the stimulus once evoked. This logic may be applied to the effects of repeated exposure to media violence.
Most of the early work on desensitization to media violence, such as that conducted by Victor B. Cline and his colleagues (1973) and Margaret H. Thomas and her colleagues (1977), involved exposure to rather mild forms of television violence for relatively short periods of time. These studies indicated that viewers who watched large amounts of media violence showed less physiological reactivity to violent film clips , compared to viewers who watched only small amounts, and that general physiological arousal decreased as viewers watched more violent media. Children as well as adults are susceptible to this effect.
Maybe this is our false sense of peace and security....we are becoming more and more tuned out to the world because we are overwhelmed by it.
Just putting an idea out there...what do you think?
