The Meaning of Collective Terrorist Threat: Understanding the Subjective Causes of Terrorism Reduces Its Negative Psychological Impact

This article hypothesized that the possibility to construct intellectual meaning of a terrorist attack (i.e., whether participants can cognitively understand why the perpetrators did their crime) reduces the negative psychological consequences typically associated with increased terrorist threat. Concretely, the authors investigated the effect of intellectual meaning (induced by providing additional information about potential economic, cultural, and historical reasons for the terrorist attack) on perceived terrorist threat and associated emotional well-being. Study 1 revealed that pictures of terrorist attacks elicited less experienced terrorist threat when they were presented with background information about the terrorists’ motives (meaning provided) rather than without additional background information (no meaning provided). Study 2 replicated this effect with a different manipulation of terrorist threat (i.e., newspaper article) and clarified the underlying psychological process: Participants in the high terror salience condition with meaning provided experienced less terrorist threat and thus more emotional well-being in the face of crisis than participants in the high terror salience condition without meaning provided. Theoretical and practical implications in the context of psychological health and mass media effects are discussed

Consumption processes and positively homogeneous projection properties

We constructively prove the existence of time-discrete consumption processes for stochastic money accounts that fulfill a pre-specified positively homogeneous projection property (PHPP) and let the account always be positive and exactly zero at the end. One possible example is consumption rates forming a martingale under the above restrictions. For finite spaces, it is shown that any strictly positive consumption strategy with restrictions as above possesses at least one corresponding PHPP and could be constructed from it. We also consider numeric examples under time-discrete and -continuous account processes, cases with infinite time horizons and applications to income drawdown and bonus theory.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figure