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FRIDAY, April 20 (HealthDay News) -- A study of Americans' dreams in the weeks before and after Sept. 11, 2001, suggests that TV coverage of the terror attacks actually increased viewers' stress levels.
The finding probably applies to most major traumatic news stories, including this week's massacre of students and faculty at Virginia Tech, one expert said.
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"Should we be allowing children to watch TV in the aftermath of this rampage in Virginia? Clearly, one of the lessons that we learned from September 11 is 'no' -- that parents should screen their kids, as well as themselves if they know themselves to be especially vulnerable -- from watching this," said Alan Hilfer, chief psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City.
Hilfer was not involved in the study, which was led by Ruth Propper, an associate professor of psychology at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass.
Her team found that each additional hour of daily 9/11-linked TV viewing raised an individual's stress level by 6 percent, as reflected in dreams laden with grim images from that day's events.
But there was also some good news from the study -- stress levels began to decline the more people talked over the tragedy with family members and friends.
The study is published in the April issue of Psychological Science.
Widely publicized disasters will always engender stress, and Propper's team sought to understand the role today's 24-hour news cycle might play in that dynamic. To do so, the researchers focused on the content of "dream journals" kept by 14 Boston-area undergraduate students enrolled in a course on sleep and dreaming. The students began the journals starting at the end of August 2001, and kept them up until Dec. 3 of that year.
Propper said the relationship of dreams to daily stress levels is still being debated. "Some people think that dreams relieve or ease stress; others that dreams merely reflect processing that leads to decreased stress; and others think there is no relationship," she explained.
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