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Across the seventy thousand blog entries, the terrorist attacks resulted in an immediate surge in the expression of negative emotions that lasted about two days; then negative emotions returned to pre-attack levels in about eleven days. At the same time, the drop in positive emotion word use showed an even more striking pattern. After a precipitous drop on 9/11, the use of positive emotion words returned to pre-attack levels within four days. By ten days after the attacks, people’s positive emotions were higher than they were before the attacks.

Note: Lines reflect the use of positive and negative emotion word usage of 1,084 bloggers. Baseline is the average of two months of blog posts prior to September 11. Data points through September 25 are by day, and thereafter by week through November 6.

One final important finding emerged from the 9/11 project. In the five or six days after the attacks, the bloggers used cognitive words at much higher rates than before 9/11. Recall that cognitive words include words that reflect causal thinking (e.g., because, cause, effect) and self-reflection (e.g., understand, realize, meaning). The cognitive words typically indicate people’s trying to understand what is happening in their lives.

An increase in the use of cognitive words immediately after an unexpected event makes sense—we all want to know what happened and why. However, starting about a week after the 9/11 attacks, the bloggers’ use of cognitive words dropped to unprecedented lows for the next two months. In fact, markers of thinking were far below the levels that existed before the 9/11 attacks.

Consider the implications of all these effects. The analysis of the thousand bloggers paints a picture of how normal, everyday people think following a large emotional upheaval. Note that within a few days of the 9/11 attacks most of the bloggers returned to writing about their usual topics—shopping plans, boyfriends, pornography, pets, the usual. Across all topics, however, the same patterns were emerging. A summary of the bloggers’ language suggests:

• Shared traumas bring people together. They pay more attention to others and refer to themselves as part of a shared identity—as can be seen in increased use of the warm you-and-I form of we.

• Shared traumas deflect attention away from the self. Even though people may feel sad, they are not depressed. Recall that people who are truly depressed show higher I-word usage, not lower I-word usage.

• Shared traumas, in many ways, are positive experiences. For at least two months after the 9/11 attacks, people expressed more positive emotions and were more socially connected than they had been in the months before the attacks.

• Shared traumas make people stupider. OK, maybe not stupider but certainly less analytic. Within a week of the attack, people wrote in simpler ways, suggesting that they weren’t thinking deeply about their writing topics. In fact, they seemed more passive and accepting of new information.

• People’s reactions to traumatic experiences change over time. The ways people think, feel, and pay attention to their worlds change drastically in the hours, days, and weeks after an emotional upheaval.

BEYOND 9/11: MAN-MADE AND NATURAL DISASTERS

Evolutionary psychologists look at the 9/11 findings and note how they make evolutionary sense. If we are in a small group on the savannah and are attacked by another group, it is critical that we band together, focus outwardly, and prepare for possible future attacks. These are adaptive reactions that can help to increase the survival of the individuals and the group itself.

Do the same language patterns exist for shared emotional upheavals that do not directly threaten the group? The answer appears to be yes. Over the course of my career, I have studied the social and psychological effects of a number of large-scale upheavals, including the Mount St. Helens volcano eruption in Washington state in 1980, the Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco