Another example that, of terror attack where we have a number of
research projects is 9/11, which of course occurred in 2001.
And there were, a lot of research has been generated in the wake of
that terror attack, and I've just focused on a couple of examples.
One was conducted by the New York City Board of Education.
They, shortly after 9/11,
they surveyed a large number of students in the New York City school system.
The older children and youth, nine to 18, and
they could see from the results of this stu,
survey that there were symptoms all around children attending the city.
Most of the children exposed were exposed indirectly.
But in New York, many of the children knew somebody who was directly affected.
And, of course, people all over the world were watching
this unfold on television, often with rebe, repeated coverage.
And they found, again, a dose response gradient.
The more exposure there was to this event, the more symptoms there likely were.
And the more personal the exposure was,
how close you were to someone that died, how close you were to ground zero, and
also how much media exposure you had, were related to having symptoms afterwards.
A number of other studies have corroborated these types of effects.
One other thing I wanted to say about 9/11 is that Rachel Yehuda
has done some extremely interesting research on children who were exposed
indirectly because their mothers were pregnant at the time of the 9/11 attack.
And she has studied both the mothers and the children after they were born to try
to understand the impact of this kind of trauma on the developing fetus.
And her work suggests that there may be fetal programming effects.
That there are differences in children who
have been exposed to this kind of trauma indirectly through impact of
the trauma on the mother while the baby was in gestation.
And she has found very similar results from her work on child,
children who were affected by the holocaust when they were still unborn.
This work suggests that there may be not only programming effects, but
they may be mediated by or explained by changes in our gene expression.
And much more work is going on to try to understand these kind of phenomena.
An important review of the 9/11 research that you
could read that summarizes a lot of the work was done by Nancy Eisenberg and
her colleague Silver, published in 2011.
And they provide a nice summary of the kind of research that was done,
the direct and indirect effects of this kind of trauma, and they underscore two
important points about the long term outcomes, in terms of resilience.
First of all, most of the children exposed to 9/11 showed
short term effects or they recovered in, in a short period of time.
And unless the children were very directly affected,
your life can be altered if one of your parents has died in the 9/11 attack, but
most people recover and go on with their lives, and so there's
a lot of resilience observed in the children after this kind of terror attack.