Charting the Emotions of 9/11 — Minute by Minute

There has always been a chilly succinctness to the way we refer to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Even before the page had turned on that shocking day — when the buildings were still smoking and the alarms were still sounding — an unspoken consensus emerged that the event would be labeled simply 9/11. Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination were never known simply as 12/7 or 11/22, but for 9/11, a numerical designation seemed to serve as a thin shield against having to name — and thus feel — the tragedy every time we discussed it.

If we’ve been parsimonious with what we’ve called 9/11, we’ve suffered its impact all the same. One nationwide study in the months following the attacks found that 4% of Americans were suffering from 9/11-related posttraumatic stress disorder, including a whopping 11.2% of New Yorkers. For many office workers who fled the sites and first responders who labored there, those symptoms still linger. Now, a new paper published in the journal Psychological Science has provided a sort of fever chart of how the emotions of Americans as a whole rose and fell in the course of that singular day. The study drew its data from a surprising — and revealing — source: messages sent on text pagers (the closest thing to texting at the time) from people around the country sharing news of the event.

A team of psychologists at the University of Mainz in Germany collected 573,000 lines of text from 85,000 different pagers, comprising 6.4 million words. The texts span the period from 6:45 a.m. E.T. on Sept. 11, or roughly two hours before the first plane hit, to 12:44 a.m. E.T. on Sept. 12, or 18 hours after. All of the messages were released last year on WikiLeaks and all have been freely available since then, but no one has subjected them to quite the kind of analysis the German team did.  Read Article

By Jeffrey Kluger