Donating to disaster victims: Responses to natural and humanly caused events

The effect of the cause of a disaster, i.e. whether it was perceived to be caused by human or natural factors, on willingness to donate money to disaster victims was examined. In Study 1 (N = 76), the cause of a fictitious disaster was experimentally varied. In Study 2 (N = 219), participants were asked about their views regarding donations to two real‐life disasters, one of which was perceived to be naturally caused while the other one was perceived to be caused by humans. In Study 3 (N = 115), the cause of a fictitious disaster was experimentally varied, but this time measures of the proposed psychological mediators of the effect on donations were included, namely perceived victim blame and the extent to which victims were thought to make an effort to help themselves. A measure of real donation behaviour was also added. In Study 4 (N = 196), the proposed psychological mediators were manipulated directly, and the effect of this on donations was monitored. Across all studies, more donations were elicited by naturally caused rather than humanly caused disasters. This difference was driven by a perception that the victims of natural disasters are to be blamed less for their plight, and that they make more of an effort to help themselves. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Media experiences and associations with mental health among the bereaved of the MH17‐disaster: A latent profile analysis

Research has shown that the amount of media exposure is associated with post‐event mental health problems. Whether bereaved individuals have negative experiences with media reports and whether they are associated with post‐event mental health is unclear. This study evaluated these experiences and associations following the MH 17‐disaster. How media reports were experienced (nine topics, modified MAS ), depression symptoms (QIDS ‐SR ), functional problems (WSAS ) and event‐related coping‐self‐efficacy (CSE ) were assessed about one year post‐disaster (May‐August 2015) among Dutch bereaved (N  = 152). A substantial minority reported negative experiences such as reports made me angry (30%) and made me sad (48%). Latent profile analysis with symptoms, problems and coping self‐efficacy as indicators, identified four classes of post‐disaster mental health: a Well‐functioning^{(class 1)}, 35.1%; a Mild‐problems^{(class 2)}, 30.4%; a Sub‐clinical^{(class 3)}, 27.0%; and a Clinical^{(class 4)}, 7.4%. Differences in symptoms, problems and coping self‐efficacy levels between classes were large according to Cohen's d s. Multivariate logistic regression (MLR ) showed that the Clinical^{(class 4)} compared to the Well‐functioning^{(class 1)}, more often that felt that reports strongly “embarrassed me,” “made me feel sad,” “filled me with fear” and “served as a magnifying glass.” Future research should assess opportunities and effects of limiting media consumption.     

The effects of group memberships of victims and perpetrators in humanly caused disasters on charitable donations to victims

The effects of group memberships of disaster victims and perpetrators on charitable donations were measured. In Study 1 (N = 92), victim group membership was experimentally varied to demonstrate an ingroup bias. In Study 2 (N = 84), a similar bias was demonstrated by varying perpetrator group membership. In Study 3 (N = 182), both victim and perpetrator group memberships were assessed. Perpetrator group membership interacted with victim group membership. Moreover, donations were highest when both victims and perpetrators shared a group membership. These effects were mediated by empathy with the victims, and perceived responsibility of the donor to intervene and aid the victim. Findings show that a salient perpetrator group can be harnessed to encourage helping of disaster victims.     

The role of event relevance and congruence to social groups in flashbulb memory formation

ABSTRACT

Flashbulb memories are vivid, confidently held, long-lasting memories for the personal circumstances of learning about an important event. Importance is determined, in part, by social group membership. Events that are relevant to one’s social group, and furthermore, are congruent with the prior beliefs of that group, should be more likely to be retained as flashbulb memories. The Fukushima nuclear disaster was relevant to ongoing political conversations in both Germany and the Netherlands, but, while the disaster was congruent with German beliefs about the dangers of nuclear energy, it was incongruent with Dutch support for nuclear power. Danish participants would not have found the disaster to be particularly relevant. Partially consistent with this prediction, across two samples (N?=?265 and N?=?518), German participants were most likely to have flashbulb memories for the Fukushima disaster. Furthermore, event features thought to be related to flashbulb memory formation (e.g. ratings of importance and consequentiality) also differed as a function of nationality. Spontaneously generated flashbulb memories for events other than Fukushima also suggested that participants reported events that were relevant to national identity (e.g. the Munich attacks for Germans, the Utøya massacre for Danes, and Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 for Dutch participants).     

Religious meaning making and attachment in a disaster context: A longitudinal qualitative study of flood survivors

ABSTRACT

The goal of this longitudinal qualitative study was to develop a grounded theory of religious meaning making and attachment in a disaster context. At 1-month (T1; n = 36) and 6-months postdisaster (T2; n = 29), we conducted in-depth interviews with a highly religious sample of adult survivors of the 2016 Louisiana flood, using a disaster-adapted version of the Religious Attachment Interview. We utilized Corbin and Strauss’s grounded-theory approach for data analysis. At both timepoints, results revealed that survivors who were theistic believers engaged in postdisaster religious meaning making in which they drew on benevolent God representations and theodicies to appraise the disaster’s cause, purpose, and religious-attachment effects, thereby contributing to positive religious-attachment outcomes (religious meanings made; e.g. renewed beliefs and experiences of God’s benevolence and providence). Findings are discussed in terms of theories and research on disasters, meaning making, and religious attachment, including implications for research and practice.     

Managing to avert disaster: Explaining collective resilience at an outdoor music event

There is considerable evidence that psychological membership of crowds can protect people in dangerous events, although the underlying social–psychological processes have not been fully investigated. There is also evidence that those responsible for managing crowd safety view crowds as a source of psychological danger, views that may themselves impact upon crowd safety; yet, there has been little examination of how such ‘disaster myths’ operate in practice. In a study of an outdoor music event characterized as a near disaster, analysis of questionnaire survey data (N = 48) showed that social identification with the crowd predicted feeling safe directly as well as indirectly through expectations of help and trust in others in the crowd to deal with an emergency. In a second study of the same event, qualitative analysis of interviews (N = 20) and of contemporaneous archive materials showed that, in contrast to previous findings, crowd safety professionals' references to ‘mass panic’ were highly nuanced. Despite an emphasis by some safety professionals on crowd ‘disorder’, crowd participants and some of the professionals also claimed that self‐organization in the crowd prevented disaster.     

Memories for the Marchioness

We examined the accounts of 27 survivors of the Marchioness ferry sinking, using cross-validation of accounts to search for instances of motivated forgetting. In order to identify objective items that could be validated, we focused the analysis on subjects' statements of whom they were with at various stages of the disaster. We compared these findings with an informal recall of a non-traumatic event after an interval of a few days. The main finding was that recall was reasonably good for both traumatic and non-traumatic events. Specifically, in the Marchioness sample, among those 86 statements that could have been confirmed in the accounts of other informants, 74 were in fact confirmed. Of the remaining 12 unconfirmed statements, only one involved a contradiction. We conclude that for a disaster of this kind, and with this particular sample of individuals, motivated forgetting was extremely rare.     

Mothers' Psychological Adjustment Following Disaster Affecting Their Children

The authors investigated the psychological adjustment of 37 British women whose adolescent children survived the cruise ship Jupiter's sinking in 1988, about 6 years previously. They compared these women with a group of widows (N = 18) and a group of women who had suffered no major negative life event (N = 15). Psychological adjustment of the 37 women was assessed with the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia Lifetime Version (SADS-L; R. L. Spitzer & J. Endicott, 1975) and various standard questionnaires. The women whose children had been involved in the disaster were found to have suffered a greater number of incidents of psychological distress in the period since the disaster than the women who had suffered no major negative life events but fewer incidents of psychological distress than the widows. The significance of these findings and clinical implications are discussed.     

The Future of Philosophy

In this article the editor of the Philosophical Quarterly briefly outlines the editorial process at that journal; explains why it is foolhardy to attempt to predict the future of philosophy; and, finally, attempts such a prediction. Drawing on his recent book Ethics for a Broken World, he argues that climate change, or some other disaster, may lead to a broken world where the optimistic assumptions underlying contemporary philosophy no longer apply. He argues that the possibility of a broken world has deep and unexpected implications for philosophy.     

Perceived human and material costs of disasters as drivers of donations

Are disaster relief appeals more successful if they emphasize the material cost of disaster events in terms of economic damages and need for shelter, food, and health care, or if they emphasize the human cost in terms of psychological suffering and trauma caused? Although giving patterns seem to suggest that large-scale events that cause widespread material damage (e.g., the Asian Tsunami of 2004) are more successful at eliciting donations than smaller scaled events, it is argued that this pattern is explained by the fact that large perceived material damage leads to more perceived human suffering. In other words, it is the perceived human suffering which is the proximal driver of donations, rather than the material damage itself. Therefore, relief appeals that emphasize the human cost of events are more successful at eliciting donations than appeals that emphasize the material cost of events. This was demonstrated in a study focusing on donations by British participants (N = 200) to the Syrian refugee crisis in 2020, a study focusing on donations by British participants to victims of severe weather events in Eastern and Southern Africa in 2020 (N = 210), and a study among British participants focusing on a fictitious event (N = 150).     

Better communication between engineers and managers

This article is concerned with ways better communication between engineers and their managers might help prevent engineers being faced with some of the ethical problems that make up the typical course in engineering ethics. Beginning with observations concerning the Challenger disaster, the article moves on to report results of empirical research on the way technical communication breaks down, or doesn’t break down, between engineers and managers. The article concludes with nine recommendations for organizational change to help prevent communications breakdown. The author holds a National Science Foundation grant to integrate ethics into technical courses. Among his recent publications are: To Make the Punishment Fit the Crime (Westview, 1992), AIDS: Crisis in Professional Ethics (Temple, 1994), and Justice in the Shadow of Death (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996).     

Conceptualizing Attachment Trauma: Exploring Emotional Vulnerabilities among Disaster Affected Children of Gujarat

This study compares attachment trauma and psychological adjustment of child survivors of an earthquake and social violence in Gujarat (n = 127). In particular it explores attachment style/s associated with the two disaster traumas and tries to explicate, what these tell us about the particular vagaries of trauma. Results show larger number of insecurely attached children in the disaster trauma sample and the dismissing attachment style dominates particularly in the earthquake sample whereas in the riots sample one can see a presence of what can be termed as a ‘mixed attachment’ style-vacillation between dismissing and preoccupied states of mind. The implications of these findings for a conceptualization of attachment trauma are discussed in details.     

Cognitive-behavior therapy for disaster-exposed youth with posttraumatic stress: results from a multiple-baseline examination

Youth traumatized by natural disasters report high levels of posttraumatic stress such as symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, other anxiety disorders, and depression. Research suggests that cognitive behavioral therapies are promising interventions for symptom reduction; however, few cognitive behavioral treatments have been systematically tested in youth hurricane survivors. The current study provides an examination of the efficacy of an intervention manual designed specifically for hurricane-exposed youth (i.e., the StArT manual) using a partially nonconcurrent multiple baseline design. Youth ages 8–13 (n = 6) who met diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder were provided the individual StArT treatment in their school. Youth were assessed at pretreatment, weekly during treatment, and at posttreatment. Results provide initial evidence for the efficacy of the StArT manual and suggest the feasibility of conducting the StArT manual in a school setting. The importance of large-scale tests of effectiveness and implementation of cognitive behavioral treatments in the wake of disaster among youth are discussed.     

Challenges of Urban Mental Health Disaster Planning

Summary

Establishing disaster preparedness is an urgent matter, particularly with regard to mental health. This article examines the challenges of mental health disaster planning in the context of an urban setting, which may differ from those pertaining to rural areas. The need to better integrate public health disaster planning and mental health disaster planning is critical. This document particularly focuses on the challenges involved in leading, coordinating, and convening an urban mental health disaster response. With time, dedication, resources, and creation of effective policy, successful mental health response capability will evolve and endure.     

Different Realities: What Is Reality and What Difference Does It Make?

Consciousness does not exist apart from psyche; it reflects it. Different realities are not interchangeable with other manifestations of psychic reality. “Borderland consciousness” is the term I have conceived for people who, in one way or another, have a living dynamic connection to and relationship with nature. Given this understanding, the oral traditional and Native American cultures manifest a reciprocity psyche, and are today the closest manifestation of the psychic reality in Genesis, pre-expulsion from Eden. Navajo language contains no words for religion, guilt, human, inanimate, psyche, or ego. The Western psyche manifests a dominion psyche; that is, a binary consciousness borne as a result of the expulsion in Genesis, and wedded to logic as an uncompromising characteristic of sanity and health. This kind of consciousness too often crushes the spirit dimension, which is transrational. An awareness of borderland consciousness is entering into the Western cultural collective. This is the telos of the Garden of Eden expulsion, and itself represents the dominion psyche and the reciprocity psyche in dialogue. This dialogue offers a critical counterbalance to the rogue behavior of the overspecialized Western ego of the dominion psyche. This article urges Jungians to develop new methods of connecting with borderland consciousness since the dominion psyche and its technology alone cannot save our species in the face of the threat of a global climate change disaster.     

The affect heuristic,mortality salience,and risk: Domain‐specific effects of a natural disaster on risk‐benefit perception

We examine how affect and accessible thoughts following a major natural disaster influence everyday risk perception. A survey was conducted in the months following the 2004 south Asian Tsunami in a representative sample of the Swedish population (N = 733). Respondents rated their experienced affect as well as the perceived risk and benefits of various everyday decision domains. Affect influenced risk and benefit perception in a way that could be predicted from both the affect‐congruency and affect heuristic literatures (increased risk perception and stronger risk‐benefit correlations). However, in some decision domains, self‐regulation goals primed by the natural disaster predicted risk and benefit ratings. Together, these results show that affect, accessible thoughts and motivational states influence perceptions of risks and benefits.     

Rebuild or Relocate? Resilience and Postdisaster Decision‐Making After Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy struck the east coast of the United States on October 29, 2012, devastating communities in its path. In the aftermath, New York implemented a home buyout program designed to facilitate the permanent relocation of residents out of areas considered to be at risk for future hazards. While home buyout programs are becoming popular as policy tools for disaster mitigation, little is known about what factors influence homeowners to participate in or reject these programs. This study used mixed methods to assess the relationship between community resilience and the relocation decision in two heavily damaged communities in which the majority of residents made different decisions regarding whether or not to pursue a buyout. The sample was composed of residents from Oakwood Beach and Rockaway Park, both working‐class communities in New York City, who participated via a community survey (N = 133) and/or in‐depth interviews (N = 28). Results suggested that community resilience moderated the relationship between community of residence and the buyout decision, leading to opposite responses on the buyout decision. Contextual community factors, including the history of natural disasters, local cultural norms, and sense of place, were instrumental in explaining these different responses. Implications for disaster policy are discussed.     

Surviving the 2015 Mount Everest disaster: A phenomenological exploration into lived experience and the role of mental toughness

ObjectivesThe 2015 Nepal earthquake and subsequent avalanche at Mount Everest Base Camp is the deadliest mountaineering disaster to date. This study is novel in exploring the lived experiences of survivors and the role of mental toughness in their psychological responses to the disaster.DesignPhenomenological study.MethodTen mountaineers, who were on expeditions during the earthquake, participated in phenomenological interviews. Data were analysed inductively and thematically, while strategies to enhance trustworthiness were also employed.ResultsSeven dimensions emerged from the data, which captured climbers' psychological responses to the disaster, ranging from the moments the earthquake hit to reflections on the disaster after returning home. Contrasting emotional responses were described, and suggested to depend on experience and mental toughness. Negative emotional and behavioural responses were reported in the aftermath. Some climbers reported post-traumatic stress, but also a strong desire to return to Mount Everest and continue mountaineering.ConclusionsThese findings provide detailed insights into the lived experiences of climbers who survived the 2015 Nepal earthquake and Base Camp avalanche. Findings also shed light on the role of mental toughness in coping with and responding to a major natural disaster.     

moral panics and disproportionality: the case of LSD use in the sixties

Critics of the moral panic dismiss this extremely useful, often-cited, and durable concept on the basis of inapplicable criteria. Drawing on the example of LSD use in the sixties, these critics mistakenly assume that the disaster analogy is apt, insisting that the threat to society, and society's responses, be very much like victims trapped in a burning building. In addition to the fact that the introduction of a new and potentially harmful drug into a society does not entail an on-the-spot threat or reaction, the natural disaster does not typically involve a folk devil or deviant. But the supposed threat of LSD use did entail sensitization, stereotyping, exaggeration, the rush to judgment, sensational anecdotes, and bogus claims. The moral panic notion continues to illuminate social processes and deserves to remain in the sociologist's conceptual tool-box.     

Archbishop Wulfstan and the importance of paying God his dues

Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d. 1023) stands as one of the most powerful churchmen of his age. His sermons, law-codes, and political tracts are carefully crafted pieces of rhetorical power, albeit often prone to exergasia, anaphora, and epiphora. They are excellent examples of the quality and power of episcopal prose in the eleventh century, and the very real concerns facing the Anglo-Saxon realm. Beyond the enduring appeal and colourful flavour of his writings, it is possible to see a very determined effort to demand from the lay population a large number of payments for the service of the Church. Whilst this may appear a rather narrow-minded focus, certainly in a time of war and invasion, it will be argued here that for Wulfstan they offered a vehicle by which disaster could be averted, society could be aligned along proper Christian lines, and the nation itself could be saved.