BOSTON A study released on Sunday suggests that survivors of air crashes could end up in better mental health than air travelers who have never had such an experience, perhaps because the traumatic experience changes victims' perspective on life, the study's co-author said. The study was based on questionnaires filled out by 15 air crash survivors, more than half of whom were aboard the United Airlines jet that crashed in 1989 in Sioux City, Iowa, and a control group of eight frequent travelers.

Participants answered questions concerning their levels of anxiety, depression and symptoms of post-traumatic stress. "The psychological well-being of airplane crash survivors compared to air travelers who have never been involved in any type of aviation accident or crash was much better on all the levels measured," the study's authors wrote. Co-author Gary Capobianco of Old Dominion University, who released the paper at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, acknowledged that the sample size was small, and said the results were surprising.

"When you've lived through something that traumatic, subsequent events that would be traumatic or trying kind of pale in comparison to surviving an airplane crash," Capobianco said in an interview. Most studies of the mental health of transportation accident victims have focused on short-term effects, Capobianco said. Very few studies have been conducted on air crash survivors, simply because there are so few of them and they tend to live far apart from each other, he said.

The results are consistent with a 1993 study on the long-term emotional health of shipwreck survivors, the authors said. Capobianco acknowledged that his study sample is somewhat self-selecting, as 20 additional survivors contacted by the researchers chose not to fill out the questionnaire, perhaps because they did not want to relive their experience. (Reuter)