Attributions about the causes and consequences of cataclysmic events

Abstract

Basic to the study of disasters and other life crises are questions about how victims and observers make sense of the event. Attribution theory, which describes how and why people ascribe causes to events and behaviors, can provide a useful framework for helping researchers in their quest to understand how and why victims and observers respond as they do to cataclysmic events. In spite of its clear potential for guiding research, surprisingly few studies looking at disaster and nearly no studies of terrorism have used an attributional perspective. While other negative life crises have been studied, cataclysmic events such as disasters and terrorist attacks possess distinctive features that set them apart from other types of trauma. Because of differences in degree of consensus, perceived control, and intentionality, cataclysmic events offer attribution researchers a unique arena in which to test and clarify basic assumptions. This article reveiws the work done in the field and outlines areas of concern for future efforts.     

Ethnic Differences in the Developmental Significance of Parentification

Using an ecological framework, this 2‐wave longitudinal study examined the effects of parentification on youth adjustment across the transition to adolescence in a high‐risk, low‐income sample of African American (58%) and European American (42%) mother–child dyads (T1 M_age = 10.17 years, T2 M_age = 14.89 years; 52.4% female). Children's provision of family caregiving was moderately stable from early to late adolescence. Emotional and instrumental parentification evidenced distinct long‐term effects on adolescents' psychopathology and the quality of the parent–child relationship. Ethnicity moderated these relations. Emotional and instrumental parentification behaviors were associated with predominantly negative outcomes among European American youth in the form of increased externalizing behavior problems and decreased parent–child relationship quality, whereas emotional parentification was associated with positive outcomes among African American youth in the form of increased parent–child relationship quality, and instrumental parentification was neutral. These findings support a multidimensional view of parentification as a set of culturally embedded phenomena whose effects can only be understood in consideration of the context in which they occur.     

Academic expectations as sources of stress in Asian students

Education is highly valued in Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC) countries such as China, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea but the expectations of parents, teachers and students themselves to excel academically can also be a source of intense stress for many students. The Academic Expectations Stress Inventory (AESI), developed by Ang and Huan (Educ Psychol Meas 66: 522–539, 2006) to measure parent, teacher and self expectations as sources of academic stress in Asian adolescents, was administered to 176 Singaporean secondary and college students one month before their major examinations. Rasch analyses of the students’ responses to the AESI showed the nine items in the inventory formed a robust unidimensional scale of academic stress, with two separate unidimensional subscales of Expectations of Parents and Teachers and Expectations of Self complementing the factor analysis conducted by Ang and Huan (Educ Psychol Meas 66: 522–539, 2006). The item thresholds showed the AESI measured the student trait range adequately, and affirmed the inventory as a brief yet valid measure of academic stress for Asian students from a CHC background. The AESI is a valuable tool for teachers and researchers, as it provides an understanding of the role of parents, teachers and self expectations as sources of academic stress among students from a CHC background.     

Does emotion processing require attention? The effects of fear conditioning and perceptual load

This study examined the impact of perceptual load on the processing of unattended threat-relevant faces. Participants performed a central letter-classification task while ignoring irrelevant face distractors, which appeared above or below the central task. The face distractors were graded for affective salience by means of aversive fear conditioning, with a conditioned angry face (CS+), an unconditioned angry face (CS-), and a neutral control face. The letter-classification task was presented under conditions of both low and high perceptual load. Results showed that fear conditioned (i.e., CS+) angry face distractors interfered with task performance more than CS- angry or neutral face distractors but that this interference was completely eliminated by high perceptual load. These findings demonstrate that aversively conditioned face distractors capture attention only under conditions of low perceptual load.