Eight Years in the Wake of 9/11: A Terror Management Analysis of the Psychological Repercussions of the 9/11 Attacks

Guest Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Notwithstanding these societal and communal transgressions, "another response to Terror has been to put quotation marks around it-to commodify it, relexicalize it for History and Geography, museumize it" (Spivak, 2004, p. 85). Furthermore, 9/11 set into motion psychological processes linked to humans' fears of mortality, such as the link between Muslims feeling unsafe post-9/11 (and associated links to PTSD; Abu-Ras & Suarez, 2009) as well as non-Muslims in the U.S. reaffirming "the American way of life" (and the consequences of such affirmations), a drive to support charismatic and more authoritarian-style leaders, and the suppression of dissenting voices, among other effects (Kosloff et al, 2009;Pyszczynski et al, 2003).…”