In Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) model of stress, tdie possibility of an earthquake, being perceived as personally threatening (primary appraisal) and uncontrollable (secondary appraisal), corresponds to a «stressor», leading to psychological and physiological stress responses. As there is nothing to do to prevent the earthquake to happen, according to the same model people will engage in emotion focused coping strategies to deal with the unpleasant feelings the threat imposes on them.

Research on systematic exposition to hazards has shown that people who live in hazard prone environments develop some cognitive adjustments to deal with danger and uncertainty (e.g., Kates, Burton and White, 1978). In line with those results, we have shown in a field study (Lima, 1991) that people who move to an environment with higher levels of seismic risk present stronger control beliefs over the earthquakes than those who remained in lower seismic risk areas. Those control beliefs are a kind of vicarious secondary control (Rothbaum et. al., 1982), whereby people rely on some more powerful agent to restore their sense of control over the environment. In our research, although subjects perceived earthquakes as externally determined, they could still keep some control over the phenomenon, rising three types of socially produced control beliefs:

Religious Control. If God is considered as the ultimate determiner of earthquakes, believers can start a serie of actions in order to influence God’s Will (to pray, to make a promise) and to prevent a disaster.

Scientific-Technical Control. If earthquakes are considered as natural phenomena and Science is seen as efficient to deal with nature, we can suppose that the confidence on Science and technology is another form of restoring the control over an uncertain situation.

Political Control. If there is political trust, if people believe that their government has efficient plans to deal with a disaster, they can restore their sense of mastering over the environment.

In line with those results, this póster presents an experimental study that tries to show that: When earthquake threat is made salient, people will spontaneously activate control schemata to cope with the threat. This hypothesis will be tested in three studies, each one dealing with a specific kind of control beliefs: Religious, Scientific and Political.

Method

Subjects.

Manipulated variable.

The independent manipulated variable in this study was «earthquake threat». In each of the three studies, subjects were randomly assigned to either the experimental or the control conditions.

In the experimental condition (Threat) subjects were told that they would participate in a study concerning the responses to an emergency situation. They were trained in the experimental task until they fully understood it, and they were asked to watch a 3 minutes video/film about earthquakes. Immediately afterwards, the experimental task took place.

In the control conditions, subjects rehearsed the experimental task and afterwards they performed it.

Experimental task.

The task employed was a word location test (Cambor et al., 1988; Stward et al1991). Subjects were asked to press a key (left or right) as quickly as possible in response to the location of a target word. The target word was presented either above or bellow a fixation point, indicated by in the Center of a Computer monitor. Target words were presented for 5 00 mseconds, with a 1.5 seconds interval between trials. Reaction times (RTs) were recorded. Each subject practised on a series of 10 neutral words. The experimental task consisted of 52 words, including 26 schema related words (i.e., «God» for religion schematic subjects; «engeneering» for the Science schematic subjects and «government» for the politic schematic subjects) and 26 neutral words paired on length and frequency with the others.

Results.

Study 2. Scientific-Technical schema.

Study 3. Political schema.

For schema related words, only the interaction effect approaches the significance levels (Interaction F(1,23)=2.97, p<.09; Exp. Cond. F(1,23)=.237, p>.60; Group F(1,23)=.387, p>.50). For neutral words there are no significant effects (Exp.cond. F(1,23)=.055, p>.80; Group F(1,23)=1.065, p>.30; Interaction F(1,23)=.233, p>.60).

These results tend to show that only schematic subjects under stress preferentially process schema related words, in order to regain the sense of control over the threat.

Our results show that two kinds of control schemata are activated by subjects in an earthquake threat condition: religious and political control schemata. We could find no evidence for the activation of the scientific schema in the same situation.

These kind of control schemata, as we argued elsewhere (Lima, 1990), are cognitive products of interactive social groups, who, for a long time, have managed to cope with stress in a earthquake prone area. The individual activation of these kind of cognitive structure in a threat situation is, on our view, an example of both the impact of social factors on individual cognition and the motivationally driven cognitive processing.

References