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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to recognize the valuable help of Hamed Razaviny and Erin Barker provided

during my research.

ABSTRACT

Explanatory journalism has long been an established source of ideas for the

Media, but reporters still have a hard time providing reliable and precise results from

an academic study. Most articles with “revealing headlines” often fail to meet the

criteria of unbiasedness, providing readers only with “preferred” (selected) facts.

Recent media reports (from October 2017) covering the AWARE study (multi-hospital

clinical study of the brain and consciousness during cardiac arrest) ended up fitting

this trend. Whereas different media outlets (“The Independent”, “The Sun” and “The

Mirror”) reveal “the shocking truth” about the “mind still working after death” when

referring to the respective academic source, the study itself states only a 2% occurrence

of awareness during cardiac arrest.

The bias in journalistic practice exists when reporters decide to include or to

exclude certain information while referring to academic papers in order to make a story

more appealing and seem more factual. Whereas an academic research invests a lot of

time into eliminating bias, media articles use bias to their own advantage, making

controversial rhetoric for higher ratings.


Comparative Analysis in Psychological Research: Evidence from the AWARE

study.

Explanatory journalism has long been an established source of ideas for the

Media, but reporters still have a hard time providing reliable and precise results from

an academic study. Most articles with “revealing headlines” often fail to meet the

criteria of unbiasedness, providing readers only with “preferred” (selected) facts.

Recent media reports (from October 2017) covering the AWARE study (multi-hospital

clinical study of the brain and consciousness during cardiac arrest) ended up fitting

this trend. Whereas different media outlets (“The Independent”, “The Sun” and “The

Mirror”) reveal “the shocking truth” about the “mind still working after death” when

referring to the respective academic source, the study itself states only a 2% occurrence

of awareness during cardiac arrest.

Thus, this paper sets out to evaluate the three media reports mentioned above

for their validity and accuracy by comparing them to the original research done by

Parnia et.al (2014). The author will explore whether the press reports use speculative

language, “cherry-pick” the facts or misinterpret the results extracted from study in

some way.

Based upon many of the findings reported in the scholarly literature, it has been

concluded that the vast majority of patients had no memory recall and were unable to

memorialize their death. A four-year multicenter, observational AWARE study

reported results based on interviewing 140 patients that survived cardiac arrest and had

NDEs, stating that only 39% (55 of 149) of respondents answered positively to the

question “Do you remember anything from the time during your unconsciousness?”,

whereas 61% reported no perception of awareness. In the study done by Parnia (2001)
56 out of 63 patients (the vast majority!) had no memory recall of their period of

unconsciousness; the remaining seven survivors (11,1%) had some memory.

Nevertheless, all three newspapers reported that cardiac arrest survivors were

aware they were dead (Downey, 2017) “seeing things that were going on around them”

(Maclean, 2017) and could even “hear their death announced” (Kitching, 2017),

completely ignoring the fact that the academic study found a relatively low incidence

(2%) of visual or auditory awareness. The semantics used in the media reports were

implemented to be misleading. This can also be displayed as the utilization of nouns

such as “people, patients, survivors”, which were deployed to showcase a collective

effect in order to add more flare in their reporting. In fact, the effect is quite miniscule,

as only one (out of 140 respondents) patient was able to specifically demonstrate full

awareness during the event by accurately describing people, sounds and activities

(Olvera-Lopez et.al, 2014).

A closer look at published media articles suggests that the bias is built into the

choices reporters make in writing their stories with the purpose to convey a certain

attitude toward their articles. When “The Sun” calls the study results “terrifying”, or

“The Independent” writes “death just became even more scary”, these statements

clearly appeal more to the emotions than to logic. Conversely, the study indicates that

none of the patients who had a NDE found it to be traumatic or distressing, rather it

was described as pleasant (Parnia et al., 2001).

It is important to shed light on the fact that most participants for the study were

men (95 out of 140 – it could be a coincidental outcome, as the study does not give

explicit explanation for this phenomenon) between the ages 21 to 94 years old (no

specific indication on background, whether the study was done on African Americans,
for example). The mean age was 64 years with standard deviation (plus-minus) 13

years. However, there is no mention about it in the Media. “The Independent”

describes only “some of those studied”. If these metrics (like age, gender) were

properly described in the Media, it would give the reader another impression of the

results, which would not allow generalization (as the study done on women, for

example, could result in a lower incidence of heart attacks, less data on this

phenomenon and less probability to get any significant results).

By carrying out an in-depth analysis on the declarations made by Dr. Parnia

(who led the clinical research group) in the press articles, it was recognized that many

of his statements were “cherry-picked” and partially misinterpreted. Both “The

Mirror” and “The Sun” quote him as follows: "They (patients) will describe watching

doctors and nurses working and they'll describe having an awareness of full

conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known

to them," leaving out the critical fact that Dr.Parnia is talking specifically about two

respondents (one of them, however, could not be interviewed in-depths due to ill

health, so, the study ended up with only one patient).

A closer look in the academic paper suggests that both patients were men (no

mention about it in the Media), both had suffered ventricular fibrillation (which results

in cardiac arrest with loss of consciousness and no pulse) in non-acute areas, where

shelves (placed by medics in order to evaluate patients’ auditory recollections) had not

been placed (no mention about it in the Media again). Why is this information

important? Taking the first point (that the patients were men) into consideration, one

is unable to generalize the effects onto the greater population as both cases of memory

recall were men. Secondly, the fact that the both patients had suffered ventricular

fibrillation (VF) potentially raises the question of some possible correlational effect
between the VF and some form of awareness. Lastly, by leaving out the third point

(about shelves) the Media articles elegantly omit the fact that the precise examination

of the validity of the specific claims associated with visual recollection is not possible.

There is worth in looking at how omitting information about the sample size

could greatly effect how one views the statistical significance of a study. Consider this:

“(…) we're trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they

go through death, because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal

experience we're all going to have when we die." (Maclean, 2017). This statement

made by Dr.Parnia in the press article was implemented in a way to give off the image

that some account the findings in his study was statistically significant. These kind of

tactics are presented through a lens, to generalize the findings of research by omitting

important information, like sample size (too small), gender (male respondents), age,

background etc. Technically speaking, to allow generalization and to extend the results

obtained by the given sample to the whole population, a statistical significance test is

needed. Only when the results for the given experiment pass the significance test they

are validated. What does it mean for the comparative analysis? The AWARE study

took a survey of a group of 140 patients. If somebody decides to draw any conclusion

based on this data, the results are likely to be highly erroneous because the population

size is far greater when compared to the sample size. Thus, The academic article

indicates that it would be unwise to draw any significant conclusion from the research

with such small numbers (Parnia et al., 2001).

The aim of the AWARE study was to investigate the frequency of awareness,

while attempting to correlate patients’ claims of visual awareness with events that

occurred during cardiac arrest (Parnia et.al, 2014). The academic article highlights the

correlational relationship between the two variables, which does not imply that one
thing causes the other. Still, the articles in the analysed newspapers tend to exaggerate

the effect, which could deceive readers that the results of the study are causal and not

correlational

The bias in journalistic practice exists when reporters decide to include or to

exclude certain information while referring to academic papers in order to make a story

more appealing and seem more factual. Whereas an academic research invests a lot of

time into eliminating bias, media articles use bias to their own advantage, making

controversial rhetoric for higher ratings.

REFERENCES:

1. AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A prospective study

Parnia, Sam et al.

Resuscitation, Volume 85 , Issue 12 , 1799 – 1805, 2014

2. "AWAREness during CPR: be careful with what you say!"

Olvera Lopez E, Varon J

Resuscitation, Volume 85, 2014

3. A qualitative and quantitative study of the incidence, features and aetiology of

near death experiences in cardiac arrest survivors.

Parnia, Sam et al.

Resuscitation, Volume 48.,(2):149-56, 2001

4. Downey Andrea (October 2017) “The Sun”

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4713871/when-you-die-you-know-youre-dead-

terrifying-study-reveals/
5. Maclean Dave (October 2017) “The Independent “

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mind-works-after-death-consciousness-

sam-parnia-nyu-langone-a8007101.html

6. Kitching Chris (October 2017) “The Mirror”

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/you-die-you-know-youre-11368627

© Evgeniia Popova (Zhenya Di) 2018

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