The effects of vicarious exposure to the recent massacre at Virginia Tech.

The authors examined whether exposure to the April 2007 Virginia Tech school shootings would increase symptoms of acute stress in students at another university who were not personally involved, but who followed the case vicariously through news media. The authors ran a series of regression analyses using multinomial logit (MNL) models, a methodology which can be used for dealing with categorical outcome variables. The authors found that as TV viewing of the Virginia Tech case increased, the probability that a student would respond with moderate or acute stress symptoms also increased. The authors were able to describe the magnitude of the relationship between vicarious exposure to the Virginia Tech case and acute stress symptomatology.