This segment continues our discussion of children in war and terror, and in this segment we are going to focus on resilience in the context of terrorist attacks. War in our time has taken on a terrifying new aspect as terror attacks have occurred with tragic frequency around the globe. And terrorism is designed to not only maim and kill as many people as possible in a given area, but also to generate a fear vector that can spread around the world and affect many additional people. We're going to focus in this segment on three examples of terror attacks assoc, where we have research findings about their impact on children. And I want to begin with the Oklahoma City bombing which occurred in 1995. And this is a photograph taken shortly after the bombing as their trying to find people under the ruble and rescue them and then of course to recover bodies from the ruble. This attack was on a federal building with a truck bomb and there were many deaths, but there were tragically children lost in this bombing because there were children attending a day care center that collapsed when the bomb exploded. There's been a number of research studies conducted by Betty Pfefferbaum and her colleagues in the wake of this bombing that have documented not only the effects, the trauma effects of children and adults, but also have studied the effects over time. They've studied the effects of media and they've studied both psychological and physiological effects of experience this bombing on young people as well as adults. And they have found, as usual, that there's a dose response gradient. The higher the exposure, the more intensively personal it was, the worse the symptoms appear to be, at least in the short run. Also, they found that media exposure plays an important role in the impact of this kind of an attack on both the general public and the victims of the bombing. Here is a photograph from the Oklahoma City memorial, which is, this is the lawn next to the building used to stand where they've created sculptures that represent the, the people whose lives were lost. Each victim who died in the bombed building is represented by a chair in this very moving park. The large chairs are adults and the small chairs represent the children that were lost. The museum itself is a very powerful experience. It's so intense that they warn you about taking children into the exhibit, and having been through the exhibit myself, I would agree with that. It is a profoundly moving, but very intense experience, and a young child could potentially be traumatized just by the museum exhibits and the experience itself. 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. She also observed and concluded in this review that the role of parents is really important. If parents are doing a lot of monitoring and modeling of resilience, they're supporting their children, and if the family, in other words, is functioning well, then you see a lot of positive recovery in the wake of even a devastating attack like 9/11. The final example I want to mention in this segment is one of the worst terror attacks in modern times. Which was the attack on the Beslan School in Russia in 2004. And this, as you may recall, is when armed separatists took over the school and held the people in the school hostages for several days. They took about 1,300 hostages, including 800 children. And they were held under awful conditions, witnessing murder. They were wired with explosives. So this was an incredibly terrifying event that went on for a long period of time. And when the rescuers came in there were a lot of lives lost in the assault to rescue the hostage, hostages. More than 300 of them died, including 186 children. This was a devastating event for everybody concerned around the world, but particularly for the town of Beslan which it, you know, is still recovering from this awful experience. And the photograph here is The Tree of Grief, which is a sculpture commemorating the lives lost at Beslan. There has been research on the Beslan survivors. But as you can imagine, this kind of research has to be done with tremendous care and sensitivity, because the experience was so traumatizing to everybody in this community, child survivors and families alike. One of the interesting studies that's come out of this terror attack, was done by Scrimin and colleagues, where they studied the emotion recognition of children who were involved in this attack, compared to children who were less exposed. And they were interested in the response to emotion in faces that are presented to the children. And they found that the Beslan victims were more sensitive to, faces that were blended emotions. They would see, react as if they were angry faces. So they appeared to be vigilant to anger in the environment around them. Very similar results have been found in, in victims of child maltreatment. It's as if children become sensitive to expressions of anger and hostility when they go through this kind of terrifying experience. There's also been efforts to promote resilience in the child survivors at Belsan. And one example is an intervention that was developed by a Swiss in collaboration with a community professionals in the area. And they had an intervention that was done through a summer camp experience. Trying to provide opportunities for fun and support at this summer camp. And they were able to observe improvement at least in the perceive resilience young people who attended the camp, comparing their their perceptions of their own resilience before they went and after they returned from this camp. There was no comparison group, so it's hard to know exactly what the impact of the camp was. But this is an important effort to try to promote resilience in these child survivors. Next time, we're going to take a more extensive look at interventions where there are comparison and control groups, and to, looking at efforts to learn what makes a difference for children who are exposed to this kind of war and terror. [SOUND]
