Terrorism Threat: Trauma, Resilience and Political Decay 

 

In the face of terrorism, rocket attacks right wing, militant stance, especially in those who begin with a more right wing approach to politics.  The study of stress and trauma has focused on pathological responses, and seldom examined either resilience or political reactivity, despite politics being one way we cope with threat.  We examine terrorist attacks and other mass casualty circumstances around the world in light of how to better define resilience, resistance, and recovery, as well as how threat and loss is impacting our political selves. In so doing the epidemiology of resilience, how it might be defined, and how it should be explored in future research is explored.  This work is critical for broadening our theoretical understanding of people’s responding to trauma, key to public health intervention, and carries enormous potential for building a Psychology of Human Strength in the face of adversity that has been absent in trauma studies. Our work on the consequences of terrorism, mass conflict and war from the World Trade Center attacks, Israel and Palestine will be presented.  This more complex understanding of impact, resilience, and resistance suggests important roles for individual differences in vulnerability and resiliency-related characteristics,  as well as the influence of key situational differences in levels of exposure, the chronicity of exposure, and environmental contingencies.and war, people react with a range of emotions from deeply experienced distress to an amazing level of resilience.  At the same time, the politics of fear can be seen as producing a shift to a more