Affect, risk perception and future optimism after the tsunami disaster

By Daniel Västfjäll, Ellen Peters, Paul Slovic. Judgment and Decision Making, 2008

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Environmental events such as natural disasters may influence the public's affective reactions and decisions. Shortly after the 2004 Tsunami disaster we assessed how affect elicited by thinking about this disaster influenced risk perceptions and future time perspective in Swedish undergraduates not directly affected by the disaster. An experimental manipulation was used to increase the salience of affect associated with the disaster. In Study 1 we found that participants reminded about the tsunami had a sense that their life was more finite and included fewer opportunities than participants in the control condition (not reminded about the tsunami). In Study 2 we found similar effects for risk perceptions. In addition, we showed that manipulations of ease-of-thought influenced the extent to which affect influenced these risk perceptions, with greater ease of thoughts being associated with greater perceived risks.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a745b0eed24c87103c3208c93d58275c6e5f6e48

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Applied Psychology

1. A. Richards
2. M. White
3. Alexa Spence
4. T. Terpstra
5. I. Blanchette

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. A. Richards
2. M. White
3. Alexa Spence
4. I. Blanchette

Citations in the corpus

• Emotions, Trust, and Perceived Risk: Affective and Cognitive Routes to Flood Preparedness Behavior (2011, background): “For instance, experiments by Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic, and Johnson(18) showed that an increased negative affect associated with nuclear technology resulted in higher risk judgments, while positive affect had the opposite effect.”
• Bringing appraisal theory to environmental risk perception: a review of conceptual approaches of the past 40 years and suggestions for future research (2012, background): “Similarly, Vastfjall, Peters, and Slovic ( 2008 ) showed that eliciting negative affect in people (by asking them to think about a recent major natural disaster such as the 2004 tsunami) influenced judgments not only when the affect was considered relevant (e.”
• The influence of affect on higher level cognition: A review of research on interpretation, judgement, decision making and reasoning (2010, background): “This has been shown for both trait anxiety and induced anxious moods (Vastfjall, Peters, & Slovic, 2008 ).”